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At seventeen, Alastor George is the youngest author Golden Antelope has ever published. Yet his subtlety and depth of experience are impressive. The People Are Puzzles front cover, which George designed, illustrates this fondness for complexity: a bonsai brain planted in a old fashioned glass jar surrounded by 18 small hand-written, alliterative "p" words. Each bit of this design is a clue about why or how people are puzzles. How is a human brain like or unlike bonsai? Why is it in a mason jar? Is cursive writing a tribute to past writers, an annoyance to present readers, or both? What's most puzzling for people who are surrounded by passion, politics, poison, progress, paradox, plastic, pathos...? What's alliteration for?
For Golden Antelope, a press which does a disproportionate number of books by retired folks, George's 44 poems, 3 essays, and 14 art works present both challenges and delights. Some of the challenges involve technologies which we "seasoned seniors" react to the way George's peers, born in the aughts (oughts?) might be expected to react to ... cursive writing, or wooden butter churns. Other generational challenges involve assumptions. We grandparental sorts aren't accustomed to specifying our pronouns; George's agemates joke, half in earnest, about our misgenderings. We remember airports without TSA screenings; today's teens accept metal detectors in schools as normal.
Even if you are a mere quinquagenarian--in your fifties--you may feel vaguely disoriented at times as our author mixes symbols from across centuries and cultures, assumes shared assumptions, or experiments with rhyme. If you're a poet, you may even occasionally say, "This line clunks." The challenges Al George's work presents to readers are real, but meeting them, considering them, is one of the core delights this book offers. People are puzzles, after all.
And Alastor George's life has given him unusually varied experiences to process. By the time he was eight, he had lived in urban Denver and rural Kremling, CO; in Honolulu, HI, Bedford PA, Kirksville, MO, and in Wilmington, NC. His family background is eclectic. His father, who spent several years as a missionary's child on a Navajo reservation, later worked as a musician and on pipelines before becoming a surveyor; his mother studied hijras in India, developed a passion for gardening, worked her way up a corporate ladder, and eventually left that world to help run a used bookstore. His younger brother could identify dozens of types of dinosaurs by age four. Alastor George grew up adjusting to new accents, assumptions, and teaching methods, finding symbols in new landscapes, losing and gaining rich friendships, meeting bullies, befriending puppies, planning a career in medicine. In his teens, he came out as trans and as an advocate for "misfits" like himself.
Digging in, discovering connections, feeling what others feel, these are timeless, ageless traits of poets--and of healers. Alastor George has been carefully watching the world, studying its codes, symbols, and people (himself included) for seventeen rich years. In People Are Puzzles, he shapes symbols and questions codes as he share human stories, especially his own.
