From the back cover:
What you’re holding in your hand is a collection of souvenirs from a 5.84 billion-mile journey. This number, give or take, is on the Earth’s odometer after completing ten revolutions around the sun. For the last ten years, two self-proclaimed idiots have been hosting a weekly reading series, peddling poetry at The Ugly Mug Café in Orange—and forming what has become a juggernaut series in Southern California.
These hosts, Ben Trigg and Steve Ramirez, have gathered poems from a selection of poets who have, at some point in the past decade, made the trek from coordinates across the country to The Ugly Mug.
Have you ever experienced free fall and the full affect of gravity? This is what it must feel like to host a series. There are moments, as with any death-defying action, when time slows to nothing and certain images or ideas are stamped on the memory in a definition higher than any television in existence. These poems are those moments, those mementos.
Read them and you’ll trace love’s orbit: blind dates to marriage to breaking up. Your travel guide could be a pilot, maybe an angel. There are cavemen and gravediggers. Examine everything from crayons to planets—this anniversary anthology covers great distances. Open to any page, surrender and let the earth spin. Let the words pass you at the incredible speed of life.
