Cartoons for the Chaos

Cartoons for the Chaos collects over a half-century of poems that address the ever present chaos of our lives, both public and private, and the emotional, political, and environmental disasters that challenge us on a daily basis. Yet perspective is everything. These poems provide models for how to (and not to) deal with conditions that, if they cannot be cured must be endured. These are poems that move us with their empathy, delight us with their irreverence, provide us respite with their beauty, anger us with their confrontation with cruelty, and stir us to think deeply with their humor. At the conclusion of a lecture Collins once gave at a Romanian university, someone wrote on the blackboard: RIDENDO DICERE VERUM, a Latin tag from Horace that means roughly: "Laughing he tells the truth." In this collection Collins sees the chaos for what it is in cartoons that can make us laugh until we cry and vice versa. A former professor and dean who has taught in many parts of the world, and currently a Zen monk practicing in the mountains of Tennessee, Richard Collins reflects on a world aflame and imparts what shreds of insight he has gathered over a lifetime on how to fight fire, sometimes with fire, sometimes with ire, sometimes with satire, but always with passion, compassion, and above all, laughter.