These beautifully interwoven essays by an outstanding storyteller and poet go straight to the heart of our common humanity. With candor, compassion, and an unobtrusive erudition, they probe the varieties of human vulnerability and remind us of the unrelenting vigilance all real love requires.
—Robert Atwan, Series Editor, Best American Essays

Gary Fincke’s epic-in-essays stands against our vanishing. Often beginning with a motif, topic, or obsession, his essays spin out freely to related life events and lead to wisdoms or clarities. Now in his late seventies, and a near-lifetime Pennsylvanian, he writes of family and gender bonds, flawed social systems, science more arrogant than wise, guilt for feeding off of others and fear of arbitrary menace.  We hear about cannibalistic shark embryos, missing moons, and anxieties about birth defects. “Sometimes the slender grace of extraordinary can be heard where tragedy seems inevitable,” he writes. In self-examination, he pays tribute to the lives and generations that inhabit him. 
—DeWitt Henry, author of Endings and Beginnings

Like pollinating insects in a garden of memories, the sections of Gary Fincke’s The Mayan Syndrome dart unexpectedly among prose poetry, essay and memoir. Fincke’s precise and unwavering language, his unsparing recounting of personalities, places, tastes, and sounds—punctuated with all manner of odd and shiny learning—unroll a haunting tableau of generations of life, in vivid snapshot moments, spent among the rust-belt horrors and elations of twentieth-century America.
—Mark Scroggins, author of Pressure Dressing

 

The Mayan Syndrome
by Gary Fincke
$23.95, paperback, 250 pp
ISBN-13:  978-1-952335-67-9

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