Six ways to purchase Chief Jay Strongbow or Timothy Gager's books (other prices vary)

How do you get me?

You can get Chief Jay Strongbow is Real, Grand Slams, The Thursday Appointments of Bill Sloan or any of my books

1. Through me, Paypal, (ctgager37@yahoo.com) $14 plus $2.63 shipping or on my website (paypal)

You make out with no shipping, I don't charge any.
Author makes out from you buying direct.
Paypal takes some of the money, unless you use the gift button.

2. Though me, Credit Card, $14

You make out with no shipping, I don't charge any.
Author makes out from you buying direct.
Paypal takes some of the money, because this option is through them

Contact me with your credit card numbers (sounds a little sketchy, I know. Sorry).

3. Though me, Check, $14

You make out with no shipping, I don't charge any.
Author 's best option.

Contact me for my mailing address. ctgager37@yahoo.com

4.  Through your favorite Indy Bookstore $14 + waiting

You make out by getting the book. Ask store to order with

• ISBN-13: 978-1945917189

Author  makes out by  very small royalty.

5.  At Amazon $14 + shipping
soon available as a  Kindle version, various prices

You make out by getting the book.
Author  makes out by sales number increase on site and the very small royalty.






6.  Though Barnes and Noble,  $14 + shipping

You make out by getting the book. Ask store to order by ISBN number   ISBN-13: 978-0996988742
Author  makes out by sales number increase on site and the very small royalty.

Bent Country/Enclave has high praise for my new book.

Here's the most excellent review,
found in the Bent Country, and Enclave also reprinted below. I love that it says I can go too unnoticed for my poetry, as often I am the novelist whom write poetry, when I'm not being the poet who also writes novels. 

Bent Country?

I'm absolutely blown away by the praise and superlatives written here.

But as it says, don't get bent out of shape, (or relax)  it's Sheldon Lee Compton's blog. So who is he?

Sheldon has a lot of fine credits himself.  His fiction and poetry has been published in more than 200 journals both online and in print In 2012, he was a finalist for both the Gertrude Stein Fiction Award and the Still Fiction Award. The Same Terrible Storm was nominated for the Thomas and Lillie D. Chaffin Award for Excellence in Appalachian Writing, while his short stories have been nominated four times for the Pushcart Prize, as well as Best of the Net, storySouth’s Million Writers Award, and cited in Best Small Fictions 2015 and Best Small Fictions 2016, guest edited by Robert Olen Butler and Stuart Dybek, respectively. 




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The Appreciation of Timothy Gager's CHIEF JAY STRONGBOW IS REAL

Chief Jay Strongbow is Real
by Timothy Gager

Big Table Publishing (July 18, 2017)
$14 paperback (Amazon)


Timothy Gager is a fantastic poet. I'd like to say this up front. And I say that for everyone. To my mind, and I could be off base in mentioning this, but I seem to think he may go unnoticed too often for his poetry. Reading his most recent collection, Chief Jay Strongbow is Real, I've become convinced he could be one of our most natural poets. His poems have this feel to them, as if they appeared to him in visions. In truth, I realize this only means he worked on them extraordinarily hard. But still, not everyone can bring across this natural feel in their work.

Take this from Act I, the first of eight sections of poems from the collection, a piece titled "Repatriation":


It’s still happening, now, as 
science, debunked their tall tale

that I wasn’t really a native American,
not a cultural item of lineal descendants

see what they dug up, check the DNA 
which shows, I still long to be in the ground.


Timothy spends a good deal of time at the beginning of this collection dealing with justice and injustice, especially in regard to the native American. In his preface, he explains that his perspective on the treatment of the native American was changed following a failed grade school assignment. He spends time on the subject in the title poem, as well, Chief Jay Strongbow, a former pro wrestler who used a racist gimmick, a popular show technique for those guys in the 1980s. But he doesn't stay on the subject, instead moving on to topics ranging from the complexities of love to the hardships of addiction.

In the poem "Sobriety" with stripped down language and minimal space, Gager absolutely sums up one of many aspects of what staying clean is like, the hourly grind of it and how beautiful recovery can be when managed successfully. The poem begins with a familiar image, the addict or alcoholic in recovery with coffee. In this instance, sitting alone in thought, viewing oil paintings.


view the oil paintings 
hung boats and fields 

thousands of brush strokes 
thousands 


But more than what he can do with a ripe subject matter, and returning to this natural rhythm his style develops on the tongue, it is his use of syntax that can astound in this collection. Of the many poems on display, none show this more clearly for me than "Nursery Rhythms." Have a look at the final stanza and consider while reading how Timothy must have labored over each syllable working in perfect concert with the other.


off my crooked clavicle
sapiens discern vertebrae 
unbreakable, resilient 
missiled. And shatterproof 
glass in pitched little houses 
is how we wind up a catapult.


Big Table Publishing just released this title. I suggest you get to Amazon and get a copy as soon as possible. BTP will have it available at their site soon, I'm sure. In the meantime, know that Timothy is writing poetry that is not only pleasing on a poetic level but is also important on a social level, aware of long-standing debts and the newly-wronged alike and poetry that offers wisdom shared beautifully, not something found easily or often. And he shares this asking nothing in return but your attention.

Publishing Day!! This calls for the blurbs and how to purchase.

1) Or order it from your favorite bookstore
2) Or contact me ctgager37@yahoo.com, if amazon is not your thing.
3) Deal if you buy from me. Any other of my books can be added for half their price.

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Good friend Rusty pictured with Heather Sullivan

Timothy Gager's latest book, Chief Strongbow is Real, is evidence of a new stage for the veteran poet and novelist. Before this book, Gager safely relied on his poetic insight into the struggle we all face, and his powerful phraseology; in this one, he stretches out into the worlds of politics and personality. His eye for the telling detail remains, but his work has become more expansive, more timely, and less hard-bitten. This is a mature poet showing us exactly what he's got: and it's good.


-Rusty Barnes Author of On Broad Sound and I Am Not Ariel.

-

Shaindel Beers- a very kind soul

The poems in Chief Jay Strongbow Is Real exist in liminal spaces. Timothy Gager realizes that like the actor who portrayed Strongbow, we are all “fake…actor[s] within/the theater of our absurdity.” These poems aren’t afraid to rail against the world we find ourselves in, where if “the cash is too good/right in our backyard, [we] sign the contracts/then set the tap water on fire.” These are poems that fight for truth and justice and love – whether we’re ready for them yet, or not.

–Shaindel Beers, author of A Brief History of Time and The Children’s War and Other Poems

Pictured with Harlym 1TWO5 at poetry workshop

Timothy's work is the cool that doesn't know it's fire. And his poetry, dry ice, cold to a flame. And all that cool, fire, ice, vocabulary and metaphor make volcanoes out of sandboxes of life and experience.  


-Harlym 1TWO5, poetic force to be reckoned with

Creative and talented Vi Khi Nao

These Timothy Gager’s poems are diurnal animals prowling the midnight streets of his heart, searching for suburban morality, conscience, beauty, rawness, hope, and simplicity of time and being. When you read his work, you will be fetching him a bowl of milk made of love and fatigue and sobriety. The poems in this collection will drill quotidian sadness and nostalgia and hope into your left torso and make you dream of fabric softener and leggings and fertilizer.


–Vi Khi Nao author of Fish in Exile and The Old Philosopher

First review of Chief Jay Strongbow is Real, by Laura Cherry Boston Small Press and Poetry Scene

THE PLAYERS

Doug Holder, poet, editor, publisher                                                           Laura Cherry, poet, reviewer              

  



        Doug, Laura








                                    and me, with a galley of Jay Strongbow, "we hold these truths..."

Put them together 

Tim, Laura, Doug
Review published in Boston Small Press and Poetry Scene
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Chief Jay Strongbow is Real: Timothy Gager Hungers for Truth

Taking its title and prevailing metaphor from a faux-native wrestler who was “arguably the biggest racist gimmick in history,” Timothy Gager’s new collection, Chief Jay Strongbow is Real, sets out to debunk our tidy, comfortable myths and cut through romantic and cultural illusions. The book is set in eight “Acts” that take on loaded topics like politics, addiction and sobriety, love and its demise, family, and poetry itself.

The collection’s introduction and opening poems indict the actions of those currently in power (“sign the contracts / then set the tap water on fire”), but he’s equally allergic to simplistic or idealistic solutions from the other side:

                The most radical revolutions

                Become conservative

                The day after the revolution

                                (“Me Thinks we Protest”)

Gager’s poems are disruptive and clever, full of his characteristic wordplay: “What doesn’t kill you makes you thinner,” “as a fly crows,” and, most light-heartedly:

                You know you slay me

                so what?

                I have dragon breath 

                                (“Loose Flowers”)

Gager is also bold and funny in his skewering of consumer culture (seventies style):

                Take Sominex tonight and sleep

                after Coke and a smile

                is how you spell relief

                                (“I'm Feeling Good About Amerika”)

The collection punctures the balloon of romance and easy intimacy (“this / dating is either gaga or nothing”) but still allows for the hope of deep connection “like a worn t-shirt / is a perfect imperfection.” Silly posturing is off the table here, but love remains a comfort.

In a world of counterfeits, compromise, disappointment and disgust (which extends even to the self: “today at the beach, my patience / vanished like waves taking turns”), the clearest story to tell may be of the adolescent hollowness that cannot be assuaged. Hunger, at least, is true, and memory doesn’t soften it.

                At age sixteen, a hundred and forty pounds

                An empty pit, my ribs stuck out like a step ladder

                My toothpick   arms with bulbous hinges

                I think it impossible   to fill my stomach

                                (“When I Think of my Childhood”)

With its distrust of smug certainties and empty nostalgia, Chief Jay Strongbow is Real might help us sharpen our own gaze, see more clearly, and act simply and boldly: “Cook a meal. / Plant a garden.” If there’s a message here, it is to look for truth and to persist. “By no means stop.”

               

--Laura Cherry

We have Front. We have Back. Chief Jay Strongbow is Real is close to being real.

FRONT (click on image to enlarge)

 BACK (click on image to enlarge)

and read the PREFACE

and Table of Contents