dan collier

For the last 4 days, I’ve been in Puerto Rico for a conference. First I stayed in San Juan, the last few days I’ve been in meetings in Rio Grande, and tomorrow I’ll rent a car to explore some more of the island and then head back to San Juan for one more night.

It’s been a beautiful island with friendly people, good food, and fabulous weather. Here are some photos:

Sunrise at Rio Mar Beach

Sherman Alexie, poet and novelist, wrote a great poem titled “Unkissed: A Fibonacci Sequence Poem” for the alternative newspaper The Stranger. The first stanza is:

Who
Knew
The man
Would jackknife,
Leave his lovely wife,
And abandon his preschool kids?
He told me once, “I hate my life.” So who knew? I did.

A set of Alexie’s sevenling poems were recently published in the online poetry journal Mudlark. (Here are the rules for sevenling poems.) My favorite was this one:

Communion

This is the last poem I will write about salmon,
My tribe’s Jesus fish, our God fish, bedamning
And bedamned. I will no longer examine

And reexamine the sins that doomed our fish.
I will not weep. My pain and fear are banished.
This is my last lamentation, my last wish:

Let my people’s famine become our Eucharist.

You can read Sherman Alexie’s short story “What You Pawn I Will Redeem” in The New Yorker, originally published in 2003 and part of the “The Best American Short Stories: 2004″. Alexie also recently had some interesting expert answers for Savage Love, The Stanger’s always entertaining sex advice column.

I loved Alexie’s book “The Business of Fancydancing” and his book “The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven” was also outstanding.

Below is a picture of my sister, brother and I and our old van. I think I am about 6 years old in this photo. I’m the extra stylish one (to the left).