Vagabond Song: Neo-Haibun from the Peregrine Journals
“A jazzy, freewheeling, rollicking road trip into the beating heart of the Eternal Now. Hop in and enjoy the ride.” –Montana Quarterly
“Vagabond Song unfolds like an impressionistic series of trip logs reminiscent of Kerouac and blending elements of hippie folk pioneer Richard Brautigan with the broad quest also shared by Ken Kesey for discovering both sturdiness and serenity within the parameters of America’s remote landscapes. The work is as ambitious as it is fluid.” –The Review Magazine
“This is a volume you can dig into and find treasure.” –Big Sky Journal
“A vade mecum of the soul, Vagabond Song leaves one hungry for more books by this author.”
–Pressenza International News Agency
“Such a damn good read it was impossible to put down once begun and then left me enraged because when it was finished it was finished. Wanted more. Lots more. … Simply put, Beaudin is a SUPERB writer and storyteller.” –Arts Saginaw
“Thumbs up.” –Foreword Reviews
“Here is a poet’s road trip, tracing the blue highways with a dazzling prose. We should all take strength from his impressive traverse.” –Doug Peacock, author of Grizzly Years and Walking It Off
“These lovely, spirited, freewheeling trip logs are charged with the poetry of motion.” –Walter Kirn, author of Up in the Air and Blood Will Out
“A poet’s song to the rewards of wandering and the joy of the highway. It’s a bracing tonic and one this sorry, sad-assed, gadget-obsessed nation needs to hear again and again. It was the lure of what was over the next ridge that gave the USA it’s promise. Every generation needs its own Whitman to remind us of this. Beaudin is just the voice young people are looking for.” –William Hjortsburg, author of Jubilee Hitchhiker: The Life and Times of Richard Brautigan and Falling Angel (filmed as Angel Heart)
“This is the kind of book parents will hide from their graduating children, but which will be found nonetheless.”–Rick Bass, author of Winter: Notes from Montana
“Beaudin intertwines expansive and lyric passages as he weaves his personal narrative, and he has plenty to say about history and politics, about religion, mythology and the spiritual curiosity that drives him.” –Tami Haaland, poet laureate of Montana
“What a roadsong! No matter where I opened the book, I was drawn into the bright moment of the journey. Only a poet could fashion such a book.” – Tamarack Song, author of Journey to the Ancestral Self, director of Teaching Drum Outdoor School
“Beaudin’s sensibility is that of a companion, an observer of the world, a Virgil on Blue Highways. When I stopped to rest, I heard his typewriter clicking and clacking in my head. Vagabond Song is one of those books that you’re never truly done with.” –Andrew Guschausky, owner of Cassiopeia Books
The Moon Cracks Open: A Field Guide to the Birds & Other Poems
“Here is a poet with a stolen quill in his hand and birdsong in his heart. Marc Beaudin’s poems dip and swerve and caw; if you listen closely enough, you might just begin to understand that the ache of the human heart can only be translated through the language of crows.” –Meg Kearney, author of An Unkindness of Ravens
“Beaudin delivers another fine collection of poems from the heartland. Like Roethke, the poems are rooted in the soil, sung from thickets and hooted in the night. Unlike Roethke, Beaudin reveals an incipient nomad’s soul with distant mountains tugging at his open heart. This book should best be read at the edge of a swamp or high on a wooded hillside. I haven’t enjoyed such singing since Jim Harrison came west.” –Doug Peacock, author of Walking it Off and Grizzly Years
“There’s an especially remarkable moment in Marc Beaudin’s poem “River Music”: He says, after floating in the Cheyenne River, “I hope that the toxins I have absorbed / will leave this river / some small part cleaner, // and will shine on my skin like a mirror.” Not only does he want to sacrifice himself for the restoration of the primal but wants us to see ourselves in him, in the body of his work, in poetry itself. The Moon Cracks Open is spoken with such honesty and openness, and written with the blood of such a lyric eye, that we do.” –William Heyen, author of Crazy Horse in Stillness & Shoah Train, Finalist for the National Book Award
“Marc Beaudin’s writing circumvents a world that revolves around technical perfection, a world that cannot keep the promises that it makes. Marc is part of an endangered species that never places a technical quality over an inner quality.” –Mike Johnston, bassist w/ Faruq Z. Bey and the Northwoods Improvisers; host of “Destination Out” on WCMU Public Radio
“In ‘The Things We’ve Lost (Branta Canadensis),’ Beaudin, ‘legs heavy with memory,’ writes:
And more and more,
life seems to be a series of things lost;
like a leaking bucket that’s carried
from a well up a long, meandering trail
till finally, we’re home, with only a few drops
to sustain us.
“But somehow, that’s enough.
“These few drops, the memories that exist in place of the past, that fill the absence left by loved ones now deceased and occupy the space of the lover now gone, are the stuff these poems are made of. The lesson being that it is not what was lost that is important, but that which remains. It may seem like little left in the bucket in comparison to what had once been there, but somehow it is enough. Enough to sustain us. For this is not a mournful poetry, but a poetry of life. A delight in and a celebration of life.” –Gina Myers, Lame House Press, author of A Model Year
“A wonderful poetic ambassador for the birds … The seamless weaving of the human and natural is what makes these poems linger in a reader’s mind long after closing the book.” –Yu-Han Chao, Rose and Thorn Book Reviews
A Handful of Dust
“Thoreau complained that nobody in our villages and towns and cities was reading the great books, but Beaudin is, as is clear in the undercurrents of A Handful of Dust.” –William Heyen, author of Crazy Horse in Stillness
“I couldn’t put the book down. It was incredible and enlightening to read about some of my own eternal, subconscious struggles.” –Amanda Lance, Welsh Dragon Books
“It’s 2 a.m. and I am still awake. My mind is humming in the afterglow of Beaudin’s book. What a beautiful gift he has created for us.” –Brad Grochowski, AuthorsBookshop.com
Jihad bil Qalam: To Strive by Means of the Pen
“Each and every author is a thoughtful person comfortable in working with words. … A book all of us would do well to read … because no matter your sentiments on the war, To Strive by Means of the Pen will challenge them profoundly.” –The Saginaw News
“This is the strongest anti-war anthology I’ve seen, and from page to page I learn things. Remarkable spirits here. … Beaudin’s contributions are strong, passionate, and come from the center of conscience (and artistry) he’s come to be.” –William Heyen, poet, National Book Award finalist, and editor of September 11, 2001: American Poets Respond
Frankenstein, Inc.
“New take on Frankenstein superbly, hauntingly chilling … Beaudin’s script is a worthy adaptation, wasting no words and written with the soul of a poet as it questions the power of today’s science and stockholders. … The opening scene is one of the best things we’ve ever seen in theatre. … #5 Arts Event of 2005.” –The Saginaw News
Little Shop of Whores
“Halloween/election satire delightfully clever …Original plays are a rarity in these parts, let alone delightful ones like this late October reworking of ‘Little Shop of Horrors,’ taking aim at the puppets in the November election. …Bravo to playwright Marc Beaudin … #4 Arts Event of 2004.” –The Saginaw News
Marc Beaudin 