THE MAKING OF A FOURTH-CENTURY CHINESE POET

You can't always let reality be your guide. THE MAKING OF A FOURTH-CENTURY CHINESE POET possesses a degree of stretching that thin field that others call reality, but when it leads you into a better place in life, it's good. This is the story of Norm Albertson, a man whose life turned out to be barren. Forced out of a job by a merger, abandoned long before by a wife, with two children who probably never thought of him, without prospect for work, and old enough to have retired already. Norm felt he'd reached the end of the road. But he didn't stop there; rather he continued on and became what he never knew he was. Norm is not Chinese; he is an American. He does not live in China; he lives in the United States. He is not of Chinese descent, his roots are mostly in Europe. He did not live in the fourth-century; he lives in the twenty-first century. And, even more amazing, he never knew he was a poet until one dull morning when facing another dismal-looking day, he scribbled a strange little note to himself. When he re-read the words, a light went off in his head, an epiphany. He understood poetry. It was a miracle, followed immediately by his reading an old anthology of Chinese poetry. THE MAKING OF A FOURTH-CENTURY CHINESE POET tells Norm's story in two brief chapters, followed by 440 little poems, some delicate as snowflakes and some as tender as a hammer. They show his evolution from the larval state he'd lived most of his life into the butterfly that he'd always been and never knew it.