Poetry. "If an ancient had an epileptic seizure, he was possessed by a thousand devils. When he regained consciousness, the devils were driven out by a healer. The devils had to go someplace. In this case they have gone into the poems.The poems roar or whisper balefully from the sand or from the wind, or stir unseen in the coiling silence; or fall from the heavens like crushing incubi.With their dismal fooleries they trasform our worthless days and disentagle a thousand evils, and they are indeed, incredible"-Nada Gordon. "Toward some crooked vein of empathy/ A subsong marries its twin in reply: / Can there be a code joined to right or ruth/ Adequately, this star-freaked wide isthmus?" -from "The Lollard's Remonstrance.

A disturbing murder reveals a high-stakes conspiracy among the ruins of postwar Dresden. Two years after the firebombing that devastated the historic East German city, the suffering continues in the throes of a brutal winter. The wary and exhausted citizens scramble to survive, wolf packs of orphans scavenge for food, and Detective Max Heller is called to the scene of a savage murder. A Russian officer was stabbed to death, and not far from the frozen corpse is an abandoned backpack containing another man's severed head. If the grisly find belonged to the dead officer, it could implicate the city's all-powerful Soviet military occupiers. If it belonged to the officer's killer, then Heller faces even more troubling questions. Despite dire warnings from higher-ups on all sides, Heller is determined to discover the answers. His investigation leads him down a trail of unspeakable corruption, desperate murders, and greater looming evils that Heller may never be able to contain.

"My American Harp" presents 1,169 poems written 2010-2014 by Surazeus that explore what it means to be an American in the modern world of an interconnected global civilization.