Do you remember riding your bike on a beautiful fall day? The excitement of coming home after school, in anticipation of an evening with maybe a special dinner, or your parents
> saying you never have to go to school again. But what if your parents told you instead that they don’t like you? There is the horror of being stranded on the side of a dirt road. A first love in the midst of the chatter of a unjust, costly war. There were times, when you were too young for romance but it came to you anyway; times in school when you made friends with your idol. Summers and winters of fascination.

Candles for November will take you to a childhood in rural America, where the pure innocence of a boy will transform the world into sights and sounds, into poems and stories written as beautifully as the seasons themselves. Barry Eysman has created a collection of pure nostalgia and wonder that will have you longing for the simpler days. In no other book will you get such a perfect blend of poetry and prose that will take you back to those early Sunday
mornings watching TV on the couch, or eating in those cafes with food of a quality that can be found nowhere else.

I am loving Candles for November. You have a very strange mind, and
the true heart of a poet. Even murder sounds deceptively sweet when penned by your
hand. All the emotions are distinctly human, those things we all feel but most couldn't
admit to in a million years to their closest friend. I am reminded that I
can follow you absolutely anywhere, because I recognize myself in the
characters, if not in form, then in content.

The opportunity to view what I have felt myself from a context world's away
from my own, and to know that it is the emotions themselves, and the reactions to those
emotions, that make us more alike than different, that no matter how we dress up, we are
all, at the same time, wonderful and frightening, beautiful and disfigured beyond recognition, everything and nothing at all.

I hear the voice I recognize in each of the pieces.

You have what I think marks one who is where they were born to be--it is a
consistancy of presence that is unique to the person; just as we move from room to room to chair to bed from place to place in the body we are with whatever grace of
movement we do or do not possess, you were born to express what you feel and
from your very first word, knew it to be the body of your hearts desire, and
your heart's break as well, and you live in words as much as your body, it
is as familiar as your own hand.

I am proud of you, Barry.

Tracy Nagurski