About this book

These poems are about coping in our strange times.

Strange times are when our usual assumptions are useless and people are dying for not realizing this. Hans Hans once thought, “One’s own death is thus the most false thing by which we judge all things false.” [https://sharpgiving.com/HansHans/sets/hans-friend.html] I may die tomorrow of a disease that I won’t be able to appreciate fully, and I may never have revealed what I am deep inside, which after all may be impossible.

Strange times are when reality conflicts with our ideals and idealistic notions.

The cover

The cover illustration is my pen and colored pencil drawing of the section of the Bayeux Tapestry depicting the appearance of Halley’s comet in 1066.

Links and shortcuts

In any page, you can click on or touch links to jump around in this book.

Each entry in the contents links to the poem.
The title for a poem links back to the contents, highlighting the entry for the poem.
Words in the headers and footers link to the index, the contents, a listing of books by the author, to this page, and to the previous and next poems in the book.

You may find the following keyboard equivalents to be convenient. Here I use the symbol ⌥ for the option key on Mac/OS or the alt key on Windows, ⇧ for the shift key, and ⏎ for the return (enter) key. Arrow keys are ◄ (left), ► (right), ▲ (up), and ▼ (down).

Keyboard shortcuts for navigating this book
Context	Keys	Jump to / Behavior
cover	⌥ ◄	Books by Tom Sharp
	⌥ ▲	About Tom Sharp
	⌥ ►	about this book (this page)
	⌥ ▼	contents
	⇧ ⌥ ▼	contents
contents	⇧ ⌥ ▲	cover
	⌥ ▼	select the next item in the contents
	⌥ ▲	select the previous item in the contents
	⌥ ►	open the selected page
	⌥ ⏎	open the selected page
poem	⇧ ⌥ ▲	contents
	⌥ ◄	contents
	⌥ ▲	open the previous page
	⌥ ▼	open the next page
	⌥ ►	in the poem “Openings,” open the prose section starting with “Vibrations”

The author

Tom Sharp is a Native American of Aleut heritage, a member of Seldovia Village Tribe. He is the author of numerous books, including Spectacles: A Sampler of Poems and Prose, Taurean Horn Press (ISBN 0-931552-10-9), a novel, Hans and the Clock (ISBN 979-8580172484), The book of science, SciFi (ISBN 979-8694935210), Things People Do (ISBN 979-8687425568), The book of beliefs (ISBN 979-8683553593), The I Ching (ISBN 979-8573510620), Images (ISBN 979-8577560515), Aleut Artifacts (ISBN 979-8575608998), Aleut Words (ISBN 979-8582103394), and First Nations (ISBN 979-8682924769).