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Well, Life Inspired Me
Love Her Blind & Other Poems is an emotionally-centered collection focused on themes of romantic betrayal, childhood violence, family memory, aging, faith, & mental illness. What inspired you to write this collection?
Well, life inspired me to write this collection, as pointedly, and as honestly as I can articulate. You see, while I certainly read and always loved poetry as a kid and as an adult in college, I have to say that my actual poetry instructors in college played a larger influence to me, upon me, as a young adult and later as an older adult; because they were there, literally and metaphorically, in my face. And what I got from my poetry instructors, meeting Amiri Baraka, and Nikki Giovanni, was more than just “write what you know” but also write what haunts you, what you vividly recall, what you yearn for and why, be bold with it and don’t hold back. Let it all out there on the page and acknowledge that it just isn’t for everyone. It’s for the select few who get it and want to get it. So in a long answer, life inspired me to write this collection, albeit alot of it in hindsight.
Were there poems that were especially difficult—or especially healing—to write?
Most were difficult, some more than others. “My Grandfather’s God” was about how I perceived this nearly mythic man, who was the first man, perhaps only man, who showed me through his actions, that a man doesn’t have to bully others or even necessarily manifest physicality (although he did) to be a man, and that a man can be quite kind, shockingly gentle to the point of perhaps seeming feminine at times, but able to do so and be very secure in that overall encasement of masculinity, humble yet confident, small but strong, empathic but able to go a few rounds if need be. Other poems were more difficult to write, such as “Bicycle Rider,” because even typing this response, I can feel the stiffness of my back against the car interior as I pedaled. But it’s through releasing and sharing that we ultimately grow and creativity is espoused and concurrently strengthened.
Do images usually arrive before the poem’s meaning, or does the meaning lead you toward particular images?
Oh, absolutely! And this is as true, if not more so, with fiction, as it is with poetry. But I remember my poetry instructor in college, whom I can’t and won’t forget, told us once that a poem, a single poem, should strike the reader in the head like a sudden, shocking bolt of lightning. That bolt can communicate love, compassion, awe, a stark memory, whatever, but a poem should carry and give at least one vivid image the reader can’t shake even if they wanted to. And if I did that, than I did my job in poetry. For fiction, it’s tougher, to me at least, because each scene should function as a short story in a way, that’s part of much broader, wider thesis about the human cycle. But we learn through imagery, we communicate through them, we absorb them on social media, on TV, online; and if we write, we tell stories through images written out and when we read we absorb images that the brain creates. And those images we create in our brains are often stronger and more long-lasting than anything we could ever see literally.
What do you hope readers are still thinking about after they close the book?
Well, I hope they come away feeling moved, maybe angered, maybe saddened, maybe enlightened or entertained; but I don’t want them bored or apathetic, because you can get that anywhere; and if something I’ve written or will write, causes fear, than I want that fear married to reflection on where that bottomless pit exists for them and why its so dark for them. The best poetry, I think, and the best fiction, too, is like a mirror the author holds up to you and says “Look into this. I’ve been where you were, where you’re headed, where you’ve thought and I get it. I want to share the both sides of this mirror with you. Let’s both dive in, from our own sides.” I want readers motivated to feel. And that’s the very least, the very least, job of anything any writer writes whether it’s poetry, fiction, or even non-fiction.
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Where long, black rivers shine like tarred-out wine.
Sunflowers hold bold gold; with winter’s bite mighty tight,
Icicle tears fall and break with each breath of brittle night.
Here love is an iron, barbed, and rusted key;
It cuts, then brightens, binding readers to see.
A hammer-fist on glass makes spidered pain anew,
And memory rains, then dries to ash-streaked stain.
Rocking chairs, once meant to soothe, turn to dread now;
They swing like storms above a child’s cold head.
Birdsong with beeps; crows counsel, sharp and rough;
They ask what you will bear, and how much is too much.
Roots drink red blood; the silent forests pray;
A Grandfather-God lifts stars like lambent clay.
A Tall Man waits there; streetlights blink and fade;
The searing needle steers your will through shade.
These poems are matchflames in the midnight room;
They stitch your heart with light, to loosen doom.
Pray, Muse, let broken visions rise,
To summon forth rising sea tides deep within inspired eyes.
Love Her Blind & Other Poems
Love Her Blind & Other Poems is a restless, emotionally exposed collection that moves through romantic betrayal, childhood violence, family memory, aging, faith, mental illness, and the strange negotiations required to survive all of them. David Somerfleck’s poems often begin with an ordinary object or encounter, then push it into a more charged psychological space. A rocking chair becomes part of a child’s understanding of violence, a bicycle becomes both escape and resistance, and a grandfather becomes something nearly cosmic. The collection’s range is clear in titles such as “My Grandfather’s God,” “Bicycle Rider,” “What I Didn’t Know About Love,” “Tall Time,” and “Mum.”
Somerfleck writes in a dense, image-driven style, piling physical detail onto memory until the past feels immediate and unstable. His strongest poems let metaphor deepen the experience rather than simply decorate it. In “Bicycle Rider,” reading and riding give the speaker a way to move beyond family cruelty, even when that cruelty follows him into sleep and imagination. In “My Grandfather’s God,” ancestry, nature, grief, and belief merge into a vision of blood moving through soil, roots, trees, and stars. These poems don’t treat memory as a tidy record. Memory becomes a living environment, full of weather, animals, wounds, voices, and figures that appear larger than life.
The book’s emotional center is its ongoing attempt to understand love without simplifying it. Love appears as tenderness, obsession, protection, grief, dependency, and renewed possibility. “What I Didn’t Know About Love” begins with harsh, dangerous images, but gradually makes room for a love that can be delicate, clear, and newly understood. That movement gives the collection more than darkness. Even when the poems enter frightening or surreal territory, they keep reaching toward connection, whether through a partner, a parent, a grandparent, an animal, a remembered landscape, or the act of writing itself.
What makes the collection memorable is the sense that every poem has been wrestled out of experience rather than calmly observed from a distance. Somerfleck’s voice can be raw, funny, grotesque, affectionate, angry, and unexpectedly gentle, sometimes within the same piece. The result is a book that feels intensely personal while still opening outward toward questions many readers will recognize: what families pass down, how pain changes perception, why love survives its own damage, and how imagination gives us somewhere to go when reality closes in. Love Her Blind & Other Poems turns bruised memory into fierce, strange music that keeps sounding after the page goes quiet.
Pages: 90 | ASIN : B0GN54HFYQ
Dystopian Warnings
One Grain of Sand is a near-future dystopian world where people are treated as expendable, and one inmate must choose between survival and becoming a sacrifice to the system. What was your moral goal when writing this novel, and do you feel you’ve achieved it?
My goal in writing the novel was speculative and extrapolative: I wanted my imagination, my subconscious, to answer the hypothetical question of “What could happen if the US continued on its current trajectory, and many of the secret programs that are now public continued in kind, across the board?” When I began writing One Grain of Sand a few years ago, I thought some of the trajectories were too extreme. But then I began seeing a lot of what’s in the book actually take shape before our very eyes. So, do I feel I’ve achieved the goal of answering that question? To a degree. I think it shows what could happen, what is happening (although obviously not literally), and where the country is headed sociologically. If Books Two and Three go the way I want them go, those two books remaining in the trilogy will answer that question more robustly.
Your future America feels exaggerated yet disturbingly familiar. Which real-world trends most influenced this setting?
I think the question also partially answers itself in that it feels disturbingly familiar. It wouldn’t feel familiar if we as a society weren’t seeing elements in and of the book, of that future today. The trends I saw influencing were, at least some of them, I think is how so much of daily discourse has become rich in hate, cruelty, bias, exploitation of fear, fear of education, of fairness and equality, of multiculturalism – when in reality science, history, biology, and history all show us that embracing multiculturalism, culture, education, fairness, equality, and embracing a future-minded perspective all make us as humans healthier emotionally and creatively. No society that shuts itself off from those forces survives for very long. Logic alone dictates there is no way for a sealed-off culture to make it, while the opposite makes it thrive. The rich disinformation online, hobbling of education systems and practices, and the turning away from our shared humanity; those are trends I find distasteful, fear-based, and tribal.
What were some themes that were important for you to explore in this book?
Themes run rampant in the novel for a reason, because we’ve abandoned our role as responsible stewards of the future. Some of those themes are democracy and equality crumbling, hedonism rising, and climate change assuming its natural path, whether we believe in it or not.
When will Book Two be available? Can you give us an idea of where that book will take readers?
I plan to write Books Two and Three at the same time, and I’m currently working on outlines for both now. Where will those Books take readers? I want to facetiously say “straight to Hell,” but the idea of the trilogy as a whole (and hence Books Two and Three) is to show the reader as full a picture as I possibly can muster of where I see this speculative, potential, hypothetical future headed, what I see it manifested as, depicting what matters most in the grand scheme of our lives when it’s all said and it’s time to lie our collective head upon the pillow one last time. The characters have lives, emotions, back-stories, hopes, and dreams that have to be resolved at least partially, and they can’t just be left alone with no one to tell that to.
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In which citizens must compete in reality TV programs for healthcare, citizenship, the right to travel, higher education, or “freedom” to live in private segregated communities?
In which tribes of hybrid creatures live in primitive outlier compounds scattered throughout the country; societal outcasts and rejects from government-sponsored human genome experiments gone awry?
What would you do if you were falling for a beautiful biracial climatologist and artist who might be a member of a radical “terrorist” network?
And whose twin sister “might” be part of that same group or a secret government organization oppressing and controlling the public?
And you knew someone, somewhere, probably has placed a bullseye on your head?
This is the future in which Noah Harpster, humble incongruent anachronism, pickpocket, and three-time loser, finds himself cast.
Like you, he’s got some tough decisions to make with too few options.
To the government, and everyone else, he’s just one more grain of sand in society’s hourglass.
And time’s running out….
One Grain of Sand
One Grain of Sand is a near-future dystopian novel that follows two lives on a collision course. Parlisse Hardamon grows up in a world of Category Six hurricanes, collapsing ecosystems, and insulated privilege, while Noah Harpster is a poor kid turned repeat offender who ends up serving a brutal fifty-year sentence in Hood State Penitentiary. Through Noah we move into a nightmare of prison violence, game-show politics, and a chilling “rehabilitation” effort called the Rahu program, a medical trial that offers freedom in exchange for becoming a human test subject for new avian flu vaccines. Around them, the Hardamon family wrestles with their own role in this world: Doc Hardamon builds strange machines and new technologies, Parlisse grows into an activist whose movement takes the name “One Grain of Sand,” and in the end Noah’s path circles back toward both the Hardamons and his own scarred childhood, with a closing image of cardinals, a tree, and a final fragile sense of inner freedom.
Some pages were fast, sharp, and emotional. Noah’s sentencing to fifty years for petty theft, handed down in an almost empty courtroom, made me angry in a very real way. The prison sequences are soaked in detail: the cardinal hopping along the fence, the guards taking bets on whether Noah will survive a gang attack, Weller’s slow, awful death traded for a carton of ecigs. The book conveys sensations that most stories rush past. That heavy descriptive style works. It slows everything down so you sit with the ugliness of the world instead of gliding over it. At times, I did feel worn out by it. Yet I also never doubted the reality of this future. It feels like an exaggerated version of what we already know, not a cartoon.
The novel leans into systemic cruelty, and that part really stuck in my head. The Rahu program is a perfect example. It is framed as “rehabilitation,” wrapped in clinical language about survival statistics and public health, but in practice, it is a state trading the bodies of the poor for a shot at safety for everyone else. The book does not debate this in abstract terms. It shows Noah sitting in front of a robot counselor that praises him with “Good job, inmate” while quietly stripping away his rights with a digital contract that waives any appeal. I liked that the story keeps the focus on lived experience rather than speeches. Noah’s flashbacks to shoplifting food and toilet paper, his father’s gambling and violence, his mother sobbing over a coat that falls apart in her hands, make the politics feel very close and very personal. I think the late shift into more overt science fiction, with Doc Hardamon’s transdimensional portal and ultradimensional beings, felt like a curveball. It adds a cosmic layer that hints at something larger than this broken America, and I liked the ambition. For me, that thread was more intriguing than satisfying.
Noah’s last emotional break, in front of the fence, watching cardinals at the birdhouse that mirrors a vision Parlisse gave him, has a small, quiet power. He lets go of his parents, forgives them without excusing them, and chooses to move on. There is no big speech. No neat fix. Just a man who has survived a lot, deciding not to carry it all anymore. That felt honest to me. The title clicks there, too. The book keeps returning to sand, to beaches that never offered Noah peace, to one grain that jams the machine, oils it, or simply lies there while the tide rolls in. It is a simple image, yet after watching these characters grind through so much, I did not mind the lack of subtlety.
I would recommend One Grain of Sand to readers who like dystopian fiction that leans more on character and social critique than on gadgets or action. If you appreciate slow, sensory prose, tough themes like abuse, poverty, and prison violence, and a story that mixes grim realism with a touch of speculative weirdness, this will be a good book for you. For me, it worked best as a long, rough meditation on pain, survival, and the tiny, stubborn ways people push back against systems that want them silent.
Pages: 473 | ASIN : B0FBHGYJDL
