Unmailed Letters to a Married Woman

Theme parks today build these monstrous roller-coasters & give them intimidating names like ''Cyclone,'' ''Hurricane'' & ''Colossus.'' They scare you & ask you to test your courage for their ride. Well, if they really wanted to scare you with the most terrifying & awesome experience in human life, they should name their ride ''Love.''


UNMAILED LETTERS is modern, blunt & powerful. The book is about a woman struggling to extricate herself from a drug abusing husband & the man who falls in love with her. It is not a book for everybody. Millions of us have had what we believe to be great loves; ecstasy we've never known before only to sink into loss's despair. So, UNMAILED LETTERS is informally divided into three parts: pursuit, capture & loss/recovery.


Pursuit is fraught with both great expectation & frustration with those expectations unmet. Ups & downs, just like everybody else's relationship. Capture is best described by the line in the book, ''I haven't written much poetry lately. I feel like I'm living it.'' One critic called the book's poetry ''a portrait of the male psyche.'' It is the recovery portion that makes this book valuable.


Mona Golabek, host of NPR's The Romantic Hours said of the poem, Human Experience, read on her program the week of Sept. 23, 2002, ''It was so moving, such a testament to the human condition, to love & loving, to desires & longing. I thought it was exquisite.''


I say the book is not for everybody. New writers are pests! We seek validation for our work, first from friends, then acquaintances, then everybody we meet. ''Read this. Tell me what you think.'' From some, the book triggered uncomfortable feelings from their own experience/the lives of their friends, & had to put it down. Others got as far as the pain in recovery - & recovery is painful. Those who finished it found new hope. The book, & life for those who face it, has a happy ending.


Shall we step on the roller-coaster?