Nylon Sunlight

Part travelogue, part sketchbook, Nylon Sunlight recounts the time Cliff Fyman abandoned his Times Square waiter job to travel in India and Nepal in 1997. No "Eat Pray Love", the work unfolds in the plainspoken, laconic, and moving style that also characterizes his poetry, especially that of his previous book Taxi Night-"probably the most entertaining and improving book you read all year", according to one reviewer, Anthony Madrid.

Madrid was right about that book, and the followup does not disappoint. Nylon Sunlight is a modern haibun: like Bashō's Narrow Road to the Deep North if it had been written by an alumnus of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics (which Cliff is). The book also includes a portfolio of earnest, sensitive drawings and watercolors Fyman made along the way. The book is likewise an extended meditation on beauty, artmaking, ethics, and belief, equally an ars poetica and an ars vitae.

In a poem towards the end of the journey, Fyman asks:

If I go into myself
all the way
where do I come
out?

Nylon Sunlight represents one answer to that question, one which deserves to be read and contemplated.