Endless Journey

Jim Hanson's Endless Journey is at once a travelogue and guidebook of trips down "Cinderella paths" and rivers both roaring and calm, along train tracks and online. In his poems, Hanson brings us with him forward and backward in time to meet up with Buddha and Burroughs, Lao Tzu and T.S. Eliot, Plato and Nietzsche, and then, after peering like Hubble into the far, dark reaches, he leads us home to the people whose "last names/and faces in high school yearbooks" we know well. Endless Journey is a wild ride, and Jim Hanson is a delightful guide-poet.

- Josh Russell, author of Yellow Jack and King of Animals: Stories, Director of the Creative Writing Center, Georgia State University

Jim Hanson's poetry takes us on a journey from mythology to Jack Kerouac. Oedipus Rex was driven by fate. He made choices but ultimately ended up where the gods preferred him to be. Jim shows how we may be driven by fate, but where we end up depends more on our own makeup---something innate or is it? "Perhaps something beyond" draws us forward as we feel our way through life and "Venture not back to your home/ where they know not who you are or what you mean."

- jacob erin-cilberto, author of Pour Me Another Poem and five other poetry books

Jim Hanson's first collection is a feast of ideas, undergirded by his broad knowledge of literature, history, science, arts, and religion. Images from varied disciplines travel comfortably together within Hanson's cohesive metaphor of journey. The seven sets of poems tackle the "hoary question of living and time," offering insights both ageless and new. Lost Journey is creative, challenging, and inventively formatted-an intelligent, provocative collection of poems that the reader will want to revisit, dog-ear, and embellish with marginalia.

- Kathy Lohrum Cotton, author of Common Ground, and President of Southern Illinois Chapter of ISPS

Out of the cacophonous multicultural clamor that we call America, Jim Hanson composes his provocative lyrics in a hero's effort to reach that which is ungraspable. He incorporates notes, chords, and themes, both harmonious and dissonant, from sources as varied as Plato and Lao Tzu, Einstein and Meister Eckhart, Saint John and Zoroaster, Heisenberg and Lucretius. Sometimes taking the role of Virgil, the guide, and other times, Dante, the seeker, Hanson accompanies us down the many strange byways of the human mind as it searches for the ineffable.

- William L. Holcomb, physician and founder of Heartland Zen Meditation Community of St. Louis

Jim Hanson's poems are about faith and the journey as a spiritual metaphor. While describing that in real life the way is often lost, he opens the way to salvation by the walking poems at the end. Great stuff.

- Hugh Muldoon, late poet and activist, Carbondale, Illinois