Donald Platt – författare

In his third collection, My Father Says Grace, Donald Platt combines elegy with verse of larger historical allusion and reference. At the center of the book stand poems detailing a father’s stroke and slowly developing Alzheimer’s disease and how it affects one family. An extended meditation on a mother-in-law’s dying provides counterpoint to elegies for more public figures like Walt Whitman and Janis Joplin. The private life in “the valley of the shadow of death” often gets juxtaposed with explicitly political verse. One of these poems records the racially charged conversations in a small southern town’s Amazing Grace Beauty Salon. Another describes a Vietnam protestor, famously photographed while sticking flowers in an MP’s gun barrel, alongside images from his later life as a transvestite. The poems tend to find themselves in the midst of crisis, historical or personal. They yearn for “transport” and strive “to be ‘carried across,’ away, out, toward, back into / / some new country / where the soul improvises, croons scat to itself alone.”

Through Platt’s trademark of alternating long and short lines, and through occasional lyric prose, Tornadoesque becomes a weather report from middle age, as the poet discovers his bisexuality in a heterosexual marriage of longstanding passion, responds to war in the Middle East and the deaths and illnesses of friends, and gives an eyewitness account of what is lost and what’s saved when a tornado touches down.

No man is closer to a woman than her confessor, not her father, not her brother, not her husband. -Spanish sayingVicente de Rocamora, the epitome of a young renaissance man in 17th century Spain, questions the goals of the Inquisition and the brutal means used by King Philip IV and the Roman Church to achieve them. Spain vows to eliminate the heretical influences attributed to Jews, Moors, and others who would taint the limpieza de sangre, purity of Spanish blood. At the insistence of his family, the handsome and charismatic Vicente enters the Dominican Order and is soon thrust into the scheming political hierarchy that rules Spain. As confessor to the king''s sister, the Infanta Doña María, and assistant to Philip''s chief minister, Olivares, Vicente ascends through the ranks and before long finds himself poised to attain not only the ambitious dreams of the Rocamora family but also-if named Spain''s Inquisitor General-to bring about an end to the atrocities committed in the name of the blood purity laws. The resourceful young man must survive assassination attempts from a growing list of ruthless foes in both Church and court, solve a centuries-old riddle to quell rumors of his own impurity of blood, and above all, suppress his love for the seemingly unattainable Doña María.

Murder, mutilation, and carrion... in paradise? ""There shall the vultures also be gathered, every one with her mate." -ISAIAH 34:15 Professional ballroom dancers Terri and Rick Hamilton aspire to be world champions. Unfortunately, Terri''s recurring back and health problems place that goal well out of reach. They travel to Terri''s birthplace, Florianópolis, on the scenic island of Santa Catarina off the coast of Brazil to vacation and visit their best friends and mentors. Along the picturesque beaches, dead penguins and eviscerated bodies wash up on the shores of paradise, and Antarctic blasts play counterpoint to the tropical storms that rock the island. The scenic wonder is home not only to urubús, a unique sub-species of the black vulture, but also to a clique of mysterious women who offer Terri perfect health and the promise of fame-at a terrible price. Rick fears Terri is being drawn into a cult and that his own life may be in danger. Will it be too late when he discovers something even more terrifying lives beneath the tranquil, tropical veneer of the island? Idyllic one moment and nightmarish the next, you never know what you''ll encounter in the city of Florianópolis-murder, mutilations, carrion, or the lure of eternal youth. Praise for "A Gathering of Vultures" "Discovering a truly different sort of horror novel is a rare pleasure... and cause for much rejoicing. Donald Michael Platt''s A Gathering of Vultures provides a glimpse of singular evil. Even the exotic Brazilian locale and the back story-involving competitive ballroom dancing-may be unique within the genre. This is the darkest of dark fantasies. Through fevered imaginings of the first rank, coupled to macabre yet erudite prose, Platt crafts an unusual and involving nightmare."