Quixote Contemplates Retirement

Lew Maltby's evocative chapbook, Quixote Contemplates Retirement, invites us on a journey of scintillating, sensual, and edgy adventures to exotic places where "hawk-eyed men with cobras/drift you eyeless/toward the point of no return," to "Just another punch-card day in the justice factory, to 3,000 feet above a doll house landscape, to adrift on a sea of moon-white skin." Maltby's imagery is vivid and fresh. The voice is a wonderful combination of bold, tender, funny, biting and kind.

And the Boomer generation is uniquely remembered as a time when "we were Carefree puppies/ playing in the gun barrel of history until four shrouded messengers /from Ohio reveal our parents' true first love."

-Doris Ferleger, MFA, Ph.D., author of To Claim Loneliness



In his new book of poems, Quixote Contemplates Retirement, Lew Maltby is gently amused at life, at people who return like ghosts "of Christmas yet to come/from which no good deed can save" us. He allows us to smile at his mother who was "quieter than the rest of us,/shorter too" and to watch his daughter Julia, "a wild pony" whom he asks, "When you break the tape and win the ribbon,/ will the color match your eyes?" He knows catching a marlin, like so many of our attacks on windmills, is a "Momentary triumph." The poems are fresh and poignant, crafted and succinct. Whether he takes us with him to Marrakech to see "hawk-eyed men with cobras" or on a parachute jump, "Step blind into a whoosh/of dark tunnel," we emerge at the end of our reading as "a milkweed in timeless blue." A book to read in one sitting and then again, poem by sustaining poem.

-Lois Marie Harrod, Spat and Fragments from the Biography of Nemesis



Lew Maltby's unique perspective, from the halls of lefty and legal justice, makes for compelling poetry. Sometimes tongue-in-cheek and sometimes deadly serious, the poems offer both personal narratives and his take on the news of the day. As Maltby testifies, "Some write flowers./I choose blood."

-Ellen Foos, author of The Remaining Ingredients