Charles Chase

Runway Lights: Calling Home Charles Chase

Publisher Marketing: RUNWAY LIGHTS: CALLING HOME "All our thoughts are dreams mid-air constructions collapsing, even as we climb the ladder to reach them." The Dreams of Atoms This book of poetry by Charles Chase is the second of four that will bear the title "Runway Lights." In this collection, Chase has brought together poems under the theme "surreal and humorous poems." As the author says in his Note to the Reader, "This book is about the absurdity of human beings, how funny they are to watch, and how mysterious, sad, and lonely it can feel to be one." Some of the poems in Runway Lights: Calling Home are overtly strange, otherworldly, surreal. Others are laugh out loud funny. But most of the poems in this collection describe a "familiar" world of events and feelings from a perspective that returns to the familiar, normalized world its original awe-inspiring qualities. As a whole, Runway Lights: Calling Home is an expansive inquiry into what it is to be human. However, rather than conducting a clinical examination into his subject, where the analyst is separate and removed from the object being examined, Chase works from within, using his subjective response - his personal experiences of being human - as both catalyst and password to a world of breathtaking freshness and mystery. As readers, we enter - or return to - a realm where beauty exists at every turn, where wonder is pervasive, emotions are raw and true, and the imagination is free to roam. Contributor Bio:  Chase, Charles Charles Chase is the founding member of several writers groups across CT, and a former president of the Middletown Chapter of the Connecticut Poetry Society. He helped to bring slam poetry to Connecticut and was a member of its first slam team which competed in San Francisco. He has been a featured poet throughout Connecticut, as well as at venues in Providence, Boston, New York City and Chicago. His poems have appeared in a variety of journals and anthologies, and include nomination for a Pushcart Prize. He has previously published two small collections of poetry, Little Book Poems and Other Things from the Connecticut Shore, (Hanover Press, 1996) and Folded Gallery #2 (Folded Gallery, 2006).