Waiting for the Needle Rain by David Spicer

Coming shortly, Waiting for the Needle Rain, by David Spicer. If Salvador Dali had been a tank commander with a cannon firing poetry . . . Along with the exquisite cover art from Nancy Clift Spicer.

Alane Rollings, author of To Be in This Number, weighs in on the book:

David Spicer's voice is a rare original. The speaker of Waiting for the Needle Rain is no white tower dweller, rather a rough, even shocking working class man in a roughneck world. “Whataya Say” starts: “Thank you for answering the ad. If you want a spot on my delivery truck, arrive prepared to follow me.” We do—to someone who doesn't know “where the Louvre is, or how long Queen E has reigned” but says “Give me the murder channel, some apricot schnapps, and a little bush I can dicker with.” A Spicer type—“not just another sonofabitch humpback with gangrene, sipping burgundy, but also a [former] violin prodigy”—unveils better than any PhD the mudslides of politics, popular culture, and slaughtered dreams. His revving diction can be resigned: “When white roses love fire . . . it will be time to launch the Jupiter missiles and portray ourselves as gods we are not.”  But this realistic representative of real men rises into a passionate continuity worthy of the Romantics: “I'll scatter like a baseball player from a dugout, shine with my medals . . . and ascend past the clouds like Jesus did way back when.”