“How should I walk? is an extended hymn to the interior life. Its variegated segments have been scored with the terse elegance of Biblical verse, but none of this preempts the poems from pulsating with humor or from ventriloquizing in multiple tongues. These spiritual meditations in tight verse only gain from their immersion in the…
“In Dan Fleshler’s book, as the speaker, “I,” recounts his experiences and dilemmas, we are immediately immersed in his life and transformed, asking the same questions, battling the same demons. When he admits, “I have no idea/how to keep my heart/pried wide open all the time,” we nod as if we have just declared this…
“Dan Fleshler calls himself a “JewBu”—a Jewish Buddhist. These poems crackle with a self-deprecating humor that seems to me essentially JewBu: taking yourself too seriously in either tradition is definitely not the way one is supposed to “walk.” This book is well worth reading more than once.– Richard Jeffrey Newman, author of T’shuvah and The Silence…
“I’ve been reading Dan Fleshler’s work for nearly fifty years. In his new book, he engages in his most searing, eloquent investigation yet of how to reconcile ourselves to suffering (our own and others). With brutal candor and wry humor, he offers poignant moments of hard-earned, sometimes unexpected hope and solace.”– David Shields, author of The Thing…
“In How Should I Walk?, Dan Fleshler’s poems blossom and sprout and explode. He plants his poems the way he depicts himself tending a patch of dirt in an urban garden—gingerly, stubbornly, with grace. This is a book about learning to walk—through illness, through beauty, through the wreckage and wonder that the world keeps tossing at…