everyone in this MOVIE gets paid

Nothing short of the entire known world is at stake in these poems.  Like a road made only of twists and turns there’s no place to rest, slow down, or pull over.  The images morph in fresh kaleidoscopic successions from wood so dark it only grows in mines to tomato sauce mixed with chlorophyll and alka seltzer.  Raphael’s concerns ricochet between the ordinary, the primordial, the deeply political and the surreal.  I know of no other poet writing today who rides the remotest edges of language so fluently.  The poems, determined as house fires, reach into every corner of waking, living, making, breaking and dreaming.  Their cyclonic power spares nothing in its path.  So, strap yourself in, take hold of this book, and be prepared to question everything: some long held beliefs did not fare well in the recent windstorm.