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Main Street Rag Publishing Company is pleased to announce Lee Stockdale’s GORILLA book launch, poetry reading, and discussion, on Tuesday, September 13th, 6:00-7:15 pm, at Asheville’s downtown Pack Memorial Library, 67 Haywood Street. 

Stockdale’s poems have their genesis in the friendship between his father, Grant Stockdale, and John F. Kennedy, for whom his father served as, among other things, JFK’s Ambassador to Ireland. Content Warning: Discussion of Suicide. 

A week after the assassination, Stockdale’s father committed suicide. GORILLA follows the healing trajectory of a suicide survivor from childhood trauma to Stockdale’s journey as a New York City cab driver; US Army Military Policeman and, later, JAG officer; and NC Public Defender. These are poems of finding peace through family, therapy, and faith in God.  

Joseph Bathanti, former North Carolina Poet Laureate (2012-14) and author of Light at the Seam, writes,  “Lee Stockdale, in his stark and memorable volume, Gorilla, takes head-on, fearlessly, the specter of mortality that looms and lords above us all. He dares it again and again and, ultimately, spits in its eye—with harrowing, surreal, and deadpan matter-of-fact razor-diction.”  

Lee Stockdale states, “Many of these poems were hard to write. I couldn’t sugarcoat what I went through. The book has a happy ending because I am  today a very happy person.” 

For Author readings, book signings, interviews, and/or feature consideration, contact Lee Stockdale: 828-458-1632 / leelawsonstockdale@gmail.com /  leestockdale.com 

 

GORILLA can be ordered at MainStreetRagBookstore.com https://mainstreetragbookstore.com/product/gorilla-lee-stockdale/ 

ISBN: 9781-59948-938-4, 72 pages, $14

 

Main Street Rag Publishing Company 

PO BOX 690100 

Charlotte, NC 28227 

Contact: M. Scott Douglass, editor@mainstreetrag.com