John High
b. 1957

A recipient of four Fulbright Fellowships, John High has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Witter Bynner Foundation, and Arts International. He is a member of the Moscow Club Poetry and a founding editor of Five Fingers Review. Poet, translator, Zen monk—he has written ten books, including the novel The Desire Notebooks. He has taught creative writing and literature in Moscow, Istanbul, Hangzhou, and San Francisco.

Vanishing Acts

2017
Paperback
210 p.

“Vanishing Acts is an astounding, yet oddly casual and unselfconscious, achievement. In a dark land beyond death, a cast of characters—including a one-eyed boy, a mute girl, carnival performers, bicyclists, handless monks, ghost-women, film-makers—wanders inside and outside landscape and language, and through various ancient Chinese religious texts. Sometimes laconic (just a scrawled note left by one character for another) and sometimes an obsessive rush of language barely patched together with ampersands, the passion of this poem nearly overwhelms. Hold onto your hats for this one!" - Norman Fischer

︎ $23.95

You Are Everything You Are Not

2013
Paperback
118 p.

"Sometimes questions are answers and answers are questions in these dialogic verses. Death, love, history, sorrow, language, joy and prayer are subjects masterfully interwoven in John High's bardic and ecstatic lines. You Are Everything You Are Not is an exquisite sequence. In the words of the poet: 'The story never leaves you.'" - Uche Nduka

︎ $16.95

A Book of Unknowing

2010
Paperback
138 p.

"Imagine a novel whose setting is dark and indeterminate, whose nameless characters are shadowy, and whose circular plot unfolds timelessly—and you will be imagining John High's A Book of Unknowing. These powerful poems, whose language rushes past in a torrent of disorienting yet evocative images and sounds, will pull you out of this world and into another, that matters a great deal more, where all that you think you know becomes doubtful"—Norman Fischer. "John High's poems, threaded together by narratives of childhood that span a century, are always immediate, grounded, and as fleeting as the moment. Throughout, High's art stays close to the heart. The music is visible" - Matvei Yankelevich.

︎ $17.95

Here: A Poem for Billy High 1959-2004

2006
Paperback
148 p.

"Reading this poem, we become aware of the 'leaves and ghosts of leaves,' crows, jays, tulips, lilacs and rain. Writing the natural world begins and ends with a 'vanishing out here among us.' And time, the 'empty boat,' implies the emptiness that is form. John High's lucid and compassionate text is threaded through with photographs taken by poet and Zen priest Norman Fischer" - Norma Cole.

︎ $15.95

Bloodline

2002
Paperback
126 p.

“High's prose is dense and mystical, and he "opens the seams of silence. Released, the voiceless callings and formless beckonings of 'impalpable connection' slide beneath the skin, to enter.the reader's own inner landscape.” - Web Del Sol 

︎ $14.95