Not Even Dogs now available from Meritage Press!

Not Even Dogs is a first in three ways: it's Ernesto Priego debut poetry collection, it's the first single-author hay(na)ku collection, & it's Meritage Press's first book to be published after making the switch to POD production via Lulu. Counting to three is a potent little charm.

Not Even Dogs by Ernesto Priego
6 x 9, perfect bound, 116 pp.
ISBN 13: 978-1-4116-8992-3
$12.99

An sample poem from the book's third section, "Cities,":

Tenth City

You
were here
before I could

understand
what cities
do to people.

I
used to
play baseball in

cornfields
now condos
with tennis courts,

and
soon you
became the monster

under
everyone's beds
waiting, breathing, grey,

enormous,
fierce, beautiful
yet horribly impossible,

full
of possibility
and still sad

and
so frustrated,
infiltrated by fears

you
yourself cannot
properly define. City

of
lost corners
and savory folklore,

full
of tastes
and noises and

overt
chaos controlled
by god knows

what
call it
quantum physics or

divine
intervention but
you are everywhere

like
a weary
fury deciding futures

of
those who
lived within you.

Here
every inch
is replete with

stories
of unrequitted
love & hate

of
aspiration &
reconstruction & the

abduction
of dreams
& everything else

for
treinta pesos
al día sobrevives

if
things go
well, remember that,

city
of lost
origins & horizons,

of
ambitions &
claxons, of ghosts

under
the fallen
buildings and tents

under
the wealthy
fantastic urban landscapes

of
non-existent cities
that are not

&
could not
but still are.

Unnamable
city, breathing
still, in spite

of
everything you
are because you,

city
where skies
have forgotten all

skies
were meant
to be remains,

loved
and hated,
populated by spectres,

seeking
justice, or
just some peace,

without
hiding behind
self-imposed jail bars.

In
my dreams
I see you

always
from above,
from the sky

or
from an
illuminated cloudy hill,

seeing
you shine
as an artificial,

sick
heart, counting
pulses before finally,

tragically,
silently, turn
out your lights.

Read the other nine cities in the sequence here. (The poems appear in the book in reverse numerical order, 10-1).