Winner of the
2003 San Diego Book Award
for Poetry
Driven into
the Shade
by Brandon Cesmat

Special CD by Brandon
with poems set to music and
original songs available through
PM and PayPal at a new low price!

93 pages, price $14.00
ISBN 0-9714003-3-4

Available through Amazon.com (CD not available with Amazon Purchase)



Driven into the Shade is a look over a life, a look back into sources, a look
into influences and confusions, a look at where this life comes from and how it
goes where it goes. There is duende here for sure, blood root dark and violent
that feeds into so much beauty rising from the ground of Brandon's history.  
This work cannot be let go because his passion is so elegantly unstoppable.  
Real art has certain elements: craft - by all means, if it is not well written we
do not take the artist seriously; a story you can connect with - it draws you in
because it tells you about yourself; a passion that drives the work and tells you
that the emotions are real; and duende.  In this work these elements are full and
present, scripted and yet unnoticed and we marvel at how the art is brought
forth and for what purpose the work is held.

Book design by Mary Ellen Wilson, San Diego California.

Poetry as treasures: poetry as words that are more than just words.
They are possibilities beyond compare.  Possibilities as poetry?
Those are the treasures we seek and find in Driven Into the Shade.
- Simon J. Ortiz, author of Out There Somewhere
Laughter Path

If I lie down for the wheel of time
to roll over me, I am full of use;
I keep time from falling, I catch memories
and hold words as sand holds the colors of
a mandala. Everyday on the beach,
blueprints to circumvent suffering are thrown
and then withdrawn to the laughter of waves.
The saline of saltwater and blood.
I remember selling plasma,
my cool red cells flowing back into the vein,
the temperature of my strange self
on the path through my heart
Read an exceptional interview, BRANDON CESMAT: ON DREAMING EUREKA in
Perigee on-line journal by Perigee publisher Robert Judge Woerheide, Summer 2004.
Review July 31, 2007 Sacramento Poetry Center
Reviewed by James Downs on PoetsWest website
Book Review from Mark Steinbeck in On The Bus 2005
The 2003 San Diego Book Award is given to books with a
2003 copyright and was awarded to Driven into the Shade
on May 22, 2004
SAN DIEGO BOOK AWARDS association SDBAA, INC. was
launched in 1993 with a gathering of like-minded people with a goal
of furthering interest and support for San Diego county authors.
If poets and lovers of poetry don't
write, publish, read, and purchase
poetry books then we will have
no say in the quality of our
contemporary culture and no
excuse for the abuses of language,
ideas, truth, beauty, and love
in our cultural life.
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