This is a long awaited for selection of poetry reflecting Ira’s many years of travel and living in the mystic lands of India and Nepal, the burning chaos of Beirut, the controlled city of Amsterdam, and the images of New York. Catharsis and prophesy are combined through incisive and penetrating imagery of man as he is, in contrast with the poet’s vision of man as he might be. Ira Cohen is a magician with words and is able to create a new kind of experience in the reader.

In 1961, Ira Cohen, photographer, poet, publisher, traveler filmmaker, hopped a Yugoslavian freighter to Tangiers where he lived and worked for four years. Returning to New York, he directed the classic underground film, “Invasion of the Thunderbolt Pagoda” and produced “Paradise Now”, a film documenting the Living theater’s 1968 tour. By the seventies he was back on the road again. As a genuine artist, Ira’s poetry speaks the truth of what he has seen on that road.