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Praise for What Needs to Be Found:
selected early information

A masterpiece of neo-absurdism, Bob Heman’s What Needs to be Found, Selected Early Information, is a “book that change[s] the sky”. Sometimes resembling strange fables, at other times finding truths through unexpected juxtapositions and apposite incongruities, these marvelously succinct works home in on weird and salutary truths. Heman is internationally acclaimed for these wry meta-linguistic and genre-defying works of “Information,” and this superb volume showcases his early bear poems as well as his fascinating homages to bees, sleep, dreams, and language itself. Reader beware, “Behind the page something else is stirring.”

Distinguished Professor Cassandra Atherton

Prose Poetry: An Introduction (Princeton University Press)

Bob Heman's trademark Information poems attest to the old adage that “sometimes less is more.” That is, a small poem (yes, even a one-liner) can contain all manner of animal, vegetable, or mineral, making busy use of the sentences and conveying sprawling depths of thought. This distinctive poet has a gift for giving just enough details to let our own minds absorb, ponder, conjure, agree, and approve. He draws compelling contrasts of surreality juxtaposed against logical and concrete boundaries of familiar and steadfast objects such as compasses and maps. Everyday items do unexpected things. Doors and trees and hats are personified in ways that make them breathe between the lines. These poems are mood-setters, sometimes somber in tone but not without sly bits of wit and wordplay. And although the poet admonishes us to “avoid the forest,” it is precisely within a deep forest of inspired originality that these poems reside. They often seem to come out of nowhere and everywhere at once, tumbling randomly yet orderly from the sky, or through tunnels, walls, and crevices. In the poem “ALWAYS THE ANIMAL,” Heman's (ubiquitous) bears “can't stop singing.” My hunch is it is because they enjoyed reading this generous and riveting collection as much as I did.

Cindy Hochman, author of I Am the Girl and co-author

with Bob Heman of The Number 5 is Always Suspect

This book contains information sorely needed by minds weeping from, and furious at, the current cultural malaise that seems to take undue pride in sleepwalking. These are poems that drift into consciousness and raise it to the nth power and burn effigies of complacency. Drive forward with the coordinates from these poems and never look back. 

• Gian Lombardo

  Editor/Publisher, Quale Press
  
  

Paperback, 124 pp.
Publisher: Madhat, Inc.
Language: English
ISBN: 978-1-968422-17-2

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