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    A Head Full of Random Thoughts
    A Head Full of Random Thoughts
    A Head Full of Random Thoughts
    Ebook112 pages29 minutes

    A Head Full of Random Thoughts

    By Rick Perry

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    About this ebook

    This debut collection of modern accessible poems comes from Rick Perry, a former high school English teacher who still believes in the magic of poetry. There are poems about family and friends, poems about love and loss, and poems inspired simply by the people and memories of an everyday life. Featuring over 80 original poems divided into five chapters, the collection offers something for everyone to enjoy. Some are serious, some are whimsical, but all are honest and heartfelt.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRick Perry
    Release dateMay 31, 2018
    ISBN9781386648611
    A Head Full of Random Thoughts

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      Book preview

      A Head Full of Random Thoughts - Rick Perry

      Introduction by Scott Perry

      In Act II, Scene 2 of Hamlet, Polonius finds Hamlet reading. What do you read, my lord? he asks. Hamlet replies, Words, words, words. At this point in the play, characters have become concerned about Hamlet’s (feigned) madness, and his reply in this exchange is part of the act: madness, (Hamlet gambits), if anything, is the inability to discern meaning in some structured string of words (this whole portion of the scene in fact takes place in arrhythmic prose, breaking from the normative iambic pentameter). Hamlet, like all of Shakespeare’s work, functions in part as a sustained meditation on the interrelatedness between words, order, life, and sanity: for Hamlet, existence itself is at issue (To be, or not to be…!) and the precarious magic of this and Shakespeare’s other plays is precisely the rescue of some sense of the stability—and livability—of life from its native chaos through the careful ordering of words—words, words.

      That is to say that poetry (the careful ordering of words) is doubly meaningful: the connotations any given moment of expression have (how strangely powerful a simple set of images, like certain smells, to transport the mind to some deeply-shelved memory, once cherished, long faded, now with the heart-cracking clarity of time passed, newly inhabited), and the strong sense, around all of that, of things carefully put right: life, memory, all of existence itself, for a moment, all visible, cleanly arranged, and in order.

      It is, it seems, part of the human vocation to, like God in whose image we are made, use language to bring order to confusion; meaning to namelessness. God, after all, brought every beast of the field and every bird of the air… to Adam to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name. God, the apostle Paul writes, is not a God of disorder, but of peace. And it is in the way in which we apprehend the small things—everyday life—and recount them to each other, that this human vocation, God’s order, and some measure of His peace can be realized.

      The islands of order and beauty and humor and warmth that these poems invite us to pause on embody this spirit exactly. Poems like these equip us to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing, end them.

      Introduction by Caitlin Sublett

      It took me some time as a

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