The Stone

"Embarking from Malaysia where he taught in the mid-80s, Joe Survant's poems in The Stone resonate with the energy and insights of West meeting East, creating a travelogue of cultural and spiritual explorations that teach us that the world is wider and more diverse than we too often imagine it from the comfort of our couches and familiar neighborhoods. These poems teemwith mystery and myth as Survant adroitly dispels the vague impressions most of us harbor of Southeast Asia. They give us what one of the poem's shamans describes as the "world without its skin," embodying universal truths from what for many of us is a new and alluring perspective. They offer a new dialect to the truths of suffering and spiritual transcendence that are at root our universal human language." -Richard Taylor, author of Fathers