Books and E-Books
Read a review of Eucalyptus here.
In which we are invited to witness the protean prose of Charles Freeland as it enters and bends around our improbably porous bodies like smoke from a library fire. Until one can no longer tell where one’s limbs or eyelashes begin and the author’s sentences end. If either can, in fact, be said to begin or end at all. Pick any one of Freeland’s expertly carved sonic doorknobs and turn to open. The room waiting there contains the very universe, if not the socks, you’re standing in right now. Beyond which: “The doors to the research labs fly open and when you peer inside there are still more doors and probably more doors inside those…”
Travis Macdonald
Eucalyptus is an unforgettable narrative about desolation. There are stories that we can do without, and this is NOT one of them.
Kristine Ong Muslim
Eucalyptus reads like a collaboration between Henry Fielding and Mina Loy. And here's Charles Freeland planning the caper, raising the stakes, and getting it down.
John Hennessy
Deviled Ham and a Picture of Jesus: Twenty Grubb Tales. Available from Finishing Line Press.
Outrageous and eccentric, colorful and immediately engaging, Grubb, the center of Charles Freeland's new collection, takes us through his odd but totally convincing world, genuinely a second universe, even if "he knows it is only the wind and the wind has no words." Grubb reminds us of Ellison's invisible man, Snyder's mythic turtle holding up the fragile world, and Kerouac's Dr. Sax, all strong presences who are in but not of the common condition, and thus able to get a real bead on us. Freeland brings us fresh perspectives here, ones we will not immediately understand, but ones we will believe, and this is the bedrock of art.
-- Heather Ross Miller
author of The Creative Writing Murders
and Lumina: A Town of Voices
Eros & (Fill in the Blank). A book-length poem first published by BlazeVox Books and available here.
Read a review of Eros & (Fill in the Blank) here.
"Charles Freeland dances under moonlight. The landscape for his delightfully curious insights is visual, symbolic, a work of art and an advanced warning dusted with allusion, playfulness and literary confidence. A poem in prose, an epistolary project, Eros unspools advice wise, subversive and funny; very funny. Sentences tumble, one after the other. Truth rides shotgun to contradiction. I suspect James Joyce has placed an advanced order for this book-length paragraph of lilting depth and joy, as well as Charles Bernstein, Charles Simic, Lee Ann Brown, Frank O'Hara and assorted scholastics and philosophers. Freeland is Polonius on acid. Unlike Polonius, the author is advantaged by having read the tragedy's fifth act while simultaneously knowing pleasures of sensation and the `fact of the human body. Its shape like the modest ginger root.' As only passionate careful writers can do, Freeland offers his readers – you and you and you – his brimming heart on his well-tailored sleeve. On our `advanced planet' Psyche is in danger, Eros cautions – though worth much regard. How bright Freeland's moon."
-- Sarah Sarai, author of The Future Is Happy
"Freeland's virtuosic proem embarks on an existential madrigal studded with fulgurate reflections, a literary eclair where moments of sharp simplicity will not brace us for constant intimate impact. There are no respites in this single exhalation, both irremediable and brassy in its delivery. Conspicuous blanks are as purloined as the thought-objects that populate this wordscape."
-- Kane X. Faucher, author of Jonkil Dies (A Mesophysical Eulogy) and The Vicious Circulation of Dr. Catastrophe
"Charles Freeland’s poetic voice is that rarity of philosophical posits intertwined with a language of emotional accord. Eros & (Fill in the Blank) contains poetry of invention, reinvention, musical decency drawing the reader into Freeland’s specialized poetic language. It involves the reader in the aspectual protocol of following the poet’s patterned thought, of allowing for spatial interpretation to engage and familiarize one with the presence of greatness in a work of art."
—Felino A. Soriano, author of 15 collections of poetry, including Various Angles of the
Interpretation Paradigm
Kindle version of Eros & (Fill in the Blank) available here.
Through the Funeral Mountains on a Burrow. A full-length collection available from Otoliths.
Read a review of Through the Funeral Mountains on a Burro here.
"Charles Freeland employs narrative sequence as a mode of aspiring to innocence. Each of these deceptively direct prose pieces, `embracing that infinity,' is replete with power to endure what finally endows the conscious mind with revelations disguised as moments. Freeland’s wry humor, charged observations, sonorous lines (`Eulalie stands thigh deep in the river'), remind us of our privilege `just to catch the echo of it, the way children sometimes catch crayfish on the end of a sharpened stick.' One final word for Freeland: `Encore!'”
-- Sheila E. Murphy
"Freeland's collection takes us on a journey with unexpected directions and deviations. Full of satire and the understated, the poetry of Through the Funeral Mountains on a Burro is masterful."
-- William Allegrezza
Variations on a Theme by Spinoza. A free e-chapbook from Red Ceilings Press. To access, click on the image.
Furiant, Not Polka. A collection of twenty-five prose poems, available as a free e-chapbook from Moria. To access, click on the image. Or purchase a print copy here.
"Charles Freeland's prose poems take us on a highspeed, dizzying trip. The everyday world of laundry lists, half-eaten breakfasts, and cars which won't start - the world we think we know so well - takes on a terrifying yet exhilirating sheen. Freeland weaves and whirls from image to image, but somehow, like an improvising jazz musician, he is skilful enough to take us with him. And not so far beneath the zany, ever-changing surface, there are quieter and darker echoes of an almost-metaphysical presence, which, however inconvenient or disturbing, refuses to leave our lives."
- Ian Seed, author of Rescue and editor of Shadowtrain
The Case of the Danish King Halfdene. A collection of twenty prose poems available as a free e-chapbook from Mudlark. To access, click on the image. Or purchase a print copy here.
Read Kristine Ong Muslim's excellent review of The Case of the Danish King Halfdene here.
A novel available on Kindle here.
Also:
Eulalie & Squid
Where We Saw Them Last
Six Kinds of Weather
Kindle version of Eros & (Fill in the Blank) available here.
Through the Funeral Mountains on a Burrow. A full-length collection available from Otoliths.
Read a review of Through the Funeral Mountains on a Burro here.
"Charles Freeland employs narrative sequence as a mode of aspiring to innocence. Each of these deceptively direct prose pieces, `embracing that infinity,' is replete with power to endure what finally endows the conscious mind with revelations disguised as moments. Freeland’s wry humor, charged observations, sonorous lines (`Eulalie stands thigh deep in the river'), remind us of our privilege `just to catch the echo of it, the way children sometimes catch crayfish on the end of a sharpened stick.' One final word for Freeland: `Encore!'”
-- Sheila E. Murphy
"Freeland's collection takes us on a journey with unexpected directions and deviations. Full of satire and the understated, the poetry of Through the Funeral Mountains on a Burro is masterful."
-- William Allegrezza
Chilean Sea Bass is Really Just Patagonian Toothfish. An e-chapbook available from Differentia Press.
“`How do we discern the truly essential ingredients?' asks Charles Freeland in this passage that serves up a combination platter of the frivolous and the significant with a rhythm reminiscent of life itself. Cultural detritus pollutes the field of our vision in the form of junk food, bar codes, and phantom pains. Natural landscapes are filtered through a force field of attention deficit disorder. What gets lost and what remains visible in this land of distractions and information overload mode? Sometimes it seems `we only register when something is amiss'. This piece moves in a way that captures both the suppression and surprising expressions of the day to day; the chugging routine and the startling little rifts in the routine, when suddenly a truly singular image or genuine moment comes to the forefront and asserts its own unique individuality."
-Juliet Cook, author of Horrific Confection
Lyrically wry, mapping the periphery of earshot with a richness of language pliable as the mind, Charles Freeland’s Chilean Sea Bass is Really Just Patagonian Toothfish is a masterfully woven narrative, a voice with big shoes filled. Prose absolved of the prosaic, poetically carving out a sensibility of the infinite in the protean, the human after all. A stunning achievement.
- Philip Byron Oakes, author of Cactus Land and Sard
Variations on a Theme by Spinoza. A free e-chapbook from Red Ceilings Press. To access, click on the image.
Furiant, Not Polka. A collection of twenty-five prose poems, available as a free e-chapbook from Moria. To access, click on the image. Or purchase a print copy here.
"Charles Freeland's prose poems take us on a highspeed, dizzying trip. The everyday world of laundry lists, half-eaten breakfasts, and cars which won't start - the world we think we know so well - takes on a terrifying yet exhilirating sheen. Freeland weaves and whirls from image to image, but somehow, like an improvising jazz musician, he is skilful enough to take us with him. And not so far beneath the zany, ever-changing surface, there are quieter and darker echoes of an almost-metaphysical presence, which, however inconvenient or disturbing, refuses to leave our lives."
- Ian Seed, author of Rescue and editor of Shadowtrain
The Case of the Danish King Halfdene. A collection of twenty prose poems available as a free e-chapbook from Mudlark. To access, click on the image. Or purchase a print copy here.
Read Kristine Ong Muslim's excellent review of The Case of the Danish King Halfdene here.
A novel available on Kindle here.
Also:
Eulalie & Squid
Where We Saw Them Last
Six Kinds of Weather
