For 8 Hours Heaven Opens To Let the Angels Play, by John W. Felsner

Poetry, chapbook, 36 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

The work should be thought of as an individual who feels separated from humanity somehow, but desires a connection. This is the true alienness of genuine alienation, and the reason a number of the poems use extra-terrestrial metaphors, to convey this sense of perceived, but quite shameful, otherness. The sense of connection is achieved through a process of sublimation, the process being one that substitutes a love for natural settings and environments,weird cultural tendencies and social encounters, for the strange shuttered world of the poet, writer, artist, or vice-versa! There is hopefully manifested within these poems an urgent yearning for freedom, while acknowledging as the Stoics did, our detestable need, as vital as food and water are, for human community and interaction, full well rounded experience! Hopefully a sense of adventure is conveyed as well, a seriously playful adventure!

The piece begins in a strange night, ends in a strange dusk, or is it dawn? It is an ending, which is only the mark of a beginning. This work, though, begins in a disoriented night, a night that doesn’t walk in an interested or curious way, but a staggering, lurching, inebriated way, the way the desperate must! The poems stagger and are sick, but it is the way in which to move towards another rising of another day, and back to the setting, on and on ad infinitum…

The final question here must be: At the end of it all, is there redemption? This work doesn’t profess to know, but it asks if the old haggard daylake knows. And Heaven atop the burning trees. And the grey headed geese and faceless mass of humanity. It asks us to consider what these aspects of Life have to contribute to that vital (to us) question. It asks us to never cease asking, that to do so would be the closest to Virgil’s Hell we could possibly know.

John Felsner was born and raised in the greater metro area of Detroit Michigan, living primarily in the suburbs of Macomb County. He worked in the building trades up until 29 or so before lighting out for the big woods of western Oregon, where he sat in trees with the voles, chipmunks and jays. But he was no Julia Butterfly-Hill, he was also on the ground selling and writing for Street Roots, the street newspaper of Portland Oregon. Treesitting fell out of style as a viable tactic and John wound up farming with poor sad farmers who needed a hand. Well, he liked it so much he started his own poor  sad farm and sadly and poorly farmed for the next 18 years. At 40 he met his current wife, and they had 2 wonderful daughters, who they still possess, and are 13 & 10 studying Mandarin and struggling in ways different from dad!

John retired from farming in 2024, so he works in a warehouse and writes!