In an act of courage Jim Gee takes his armor off, and brutally honest, he peels back the layers, until all contrivance has left him and he appears before us vulnerable on the page. Sometimes cynical, sometimes searing, at times gut wrenching, Gee's poems are of heart, mind, soul. Filled with pathos and humor they have the power to turn us inside out and make us think about our own lives, about our relationships with each other, about our covenants with religion, and about our passivity in dealing with the government and bureaucracies. These are poems not only for quiet contemplation, but also poems to be shared. There is enough in them to keep a conversation going in a class in the humanities or sciences for an entire semester, and the issues raised about the politics and ethics of representation, the demands of official ideologies, and the inexplicable human capacity for good and evil, are more than enough to keep us all conscious of the increasing dehumanization of the age in which we live. | Blowing Out the Candles by James Paul Gee, Paperback | Indigo Chapters