The poems in The Fires of Heraclitus run the gamut from funny, to acerbic, to heartbreaking. Within them, exes spend their last phone call quoting song lyrics, a father longs to play baseball with his son, Medusa roams the dating apps, and the Oklahoma sun flares as it can only there. Here Paul Juhasz exposes a surprise of adulthood: that the drama of our lives often comes without drama but is instead dismaying, subversive, startling, and often quieter than we expected. It is no stretch to say that The Fires of Heraclitus is Juhasz’s finest collection of poems yet.

 

--Joey Brown, author of Oklahomaography and The Feral Love Poems

 

 

Paul Juhasz pulls no punches in The Fires of Heraclitus. He can give a two-word question a two-page answer, and make it a damn good one. He can contain frustration in a haiku. He can break your heart like an Easter egg, or stretch it like a condom. And no holiday is safe. In his long poem “Solitary Journey,” he creates a panoramic photo-sequence out of words—not one picture taken on the trip: “I’ve been driving through / storm clouds my whole life. / I’ll drive into this one. // And the one after that.” There is power and a hard-earned recovery in these poems.

 

--Nathan Brown, author of In the Days of Our Endurance

 

 

This collection of poetry and prose is an almanac of the author’s long journey from

“whistling songs to honor the wound” of a troubled past to emerge with acceptance,

peace and hope for renewal in “the unfathomable beauty of Now.” The collection is

remarkable for the wide variety of places it visits and the wide range of ideas and feelings

they inspire. Juhasz looks trouble in the face and engages it with lively language, a keen

sense of wonder, and a wry irony that makes this book a tonic for heart and mind.

 

--Paul Austin, author of Notes on Hard Times

 

 

In the long, elegiac, “Solitary Journey,” the poet, himself a transplant from New Jersey to the Oklahoma plains, declares himself “An itinerant without an itinerary,” tells us “I have not taken any pictures on this trip. It is not that kind of journey...It is not memory I want, but presence...speaks of the vast difference between alone and solitary.” After crossing the Continental Divide, Juhasz realizes that the horizon he’s been looking for has been there all the time: “we carry it within us.” If this reminds us of Gary Cooper, Tom Joad, Superman, this is no accident; Juhasz’s “fuse” is Heraclitus’s fire, the foundation of the universe, and Juhasz shares Heraclitus’s view that there is no “is,” only “becoming,” that all is flux, and standing still is not the objective.

 

--Bob Dean, author of The Aerialist Will Not Be Performing