I'm happy to announce that this week Amazon rates "Raised in the Shadow", my life in 25 poems, as #607,825 on their best-seller list. Last week it was rated #3,225,478. For those of you who don't have a pencil and paper handy, that's a jump of 2,617,653 places. Wow! How DO they figure these things? I have no clue, and, after some google-sleuthing, I have come to the conclusion that neither does anyone else.  

By the way, this collection of 25 poems, written over the course of the year I turned 50, is only12 bucks which, again for those of you not sitting in front of paper and pencil, comes out to only 48 cents per poem. Can you believe it? Only 48 cents!! So, here's a sample of what 48 cents will get you these days: 
  

THE ARCHERS 

They are moving quietly 
through the shadows, 
barely below the threshold of my discomfort 

They are whispering my name, 
the one I forgot.  

They are tugging, insistent, forcerful, 
their firm, dark hands 
on the blades of my shoulder, 
turning me first this way, then that 

Like an arrow, they aim me 
with tender merciless love. 
directly  toward the center of my fear, 
their exquisite accuracy measured 
unerringly by the windsock of my resistance 

It is an oddly practical dynamic: 
The harder I struggle, the clearer their target. 

                                         -(c) p.n. rosenberg 
  
  
If you don't already have a copy of RITS, you can help me move north on that ol' Amazon Best Seller list and have a little poetry with your coffee in the mornings to boot! Go to Amazon and order up a copy. Free shipping with an order over $35, so you can order 3 and enrich two poet-poor friends. Oh, the good deeds abound! 

Here's to a New Year, may it be filled with poetry and song! 

From Coyote Gulch Studios, high in the wild mojave, 
Phillip