Those of my watchers who have enjoyed my collaboration, over several years now, with the Chicago street photographer, jonniedee now have an opportunity to see and read these pieces in our freshly published E-book, Overview.

You can download it from Amazon straight onto your Kindle (Amazon also offers a free download of Kindle software, so that their publications can be read on other tablets or PCs). Should you decide to fritter away a few dollars, you might note jonniedee or me to tell us what you think. Here's the cover photo, that illustrates the title poem to give you a taster of what can be found in the book:


Overview
Has she ever seen
so much of her world at once?
all beneath her feet.
Will this moment completely
transform her understanding?


I have also started  on another ebook publication project with the Argentinian photographer guille1701. It should be ready to load on to Kindle early in the New Year.

If you should be browsing Kindle, you could also look out for It Don't Mean A Thing, which is collection from my shorter prose pieces.

I thought I'd round off this journal with a feature drawn from my manip collection:

       

 

Mature Content

   

   

A lot of galleries for you to visit!

I must admit that I'm sceptical about the industry of publishing and its often tenuous connection with the art of writing. My skepticism seems to widely shared, to judge by the burgeoning self- publishing market,  which I believe many fellow deviants have flirted with in recent years.

After more than fifty years of creative activity, I have finally steeled myself to dip a toe into this deep and treacherous pool! In my frequent journeys in London's public transport system, I have noticed that the attention of many of my fellow passengers is engrossed by slim tablets and by the text displays that scroll across them. These people are reading ebooks, many of them courtesy of Amazon and its artfully named tablet, Kindle.

  I now have my first Kindle title

It's called It Don't Mean A Thing, A Prose Miscellany by Alec Bell
Here's a link to the Amazon page: www.amazon.com/dp/B00DNDJ2PK


This morning the postman knocked on my door. When I answered he handed my an impressively sized cardboard tube with stickers indicating that it had come from Deviant Art. The tube contained a richly coloured abstract print. There was no indication of who my artistic benefactor might be, but I would like to thank this person for taking so much trouble to enrich my otherwise dreary surroundings!

Now that I have discovered which way up the print is supposed to be, I realise that it is not abstract at all. The picture is called Two Boats by :devherrerojulia

When I opened up my Deviant Art account two days ago, I was surprised and delighted to discover that  Shades alecbell.deviantart.com/art/Sh… had been selected for the day's DD poem!

My warmest thanks go to fyoot, for suggesting and BeccaJS for featuring my poem

Shades is a commentary on an image created by alterallensteiner, who was one of the first photographers I started to watch in my early days on dA. He seeks out derelict and abandoned buildings in that part of Eastern Europe that has been claimed at various times by Germany, Russia and Poland he finds his imsges  within great houses, abandoned to decay, and industrial complexes now derelict, was providing the wealth of Eastern European Soviet sattelites.

Decay is a natural subject for poems. These relics of lost time have a very particular poignancy. As a thank you for having inspired shades, here are other images of his that have also proved inspirational. I suggest you might visit his gallery so see his remarkable pictures.

Here are thumbnails to more of my poems commenting on his work (I have had to use thumbnails linking to my poems because :devalterallensteirner: has removed much of his earlier work from his gallery)

Concrete
Blocks of man made rock,
blind, dumb, stubbornly resist
winter's chiselling. The Princess Has Escaped
She made her escape,
the twisted blind remains.
Who did she run to? Waste Ground
Long deserted plant.
Citadel of industry
decaying slowly Crepuscular
Do ghosts linger here?
Too easily imagined,
shades as dusk deepens.
The evening breeze whispers,
rustling the grass with secrets. Destruction
Past generations
have lost their identities,
the family ceased.
A future they must have feared
even to visualise.


More recent examples of empty interiors and crumbling industry from his gallery:

:thumb345028742: :thumb342456056: :thumb339430576: :thumb339430576: :thumb368096902: :thumb361453456: :thumb359976522: :thumb347115404:

:thumb341454296: :thumb305451279: :thumb297365637: :thumb287802733: :thumb284235398: :thumb271657828: :thumb269620384: :thumb264849713:

The visual Winners

1st: :thumb367903868:

2nd: :

3rd:


The Lierature Winners

1st: Wednesdays24601? I grumble, and my therapist laughs at me.
I can’t help but grin. Seen that movie twice already,
how else can I answer “Who Am I”?
There’s a crinkle to her eyes when she talks of my
humor. Let them see, she says, and I fiddle with my cap
twisted in my hands, brown and scratchy ‘neath my gnawed-on-torn fingernails
Rain on fresh paint, damp heat in a cluttered chair. I’m
twenty-two and take six pills, I say. I roll my face around on the keyboard and
words come out and sometimes I call that writing.
I watch insects click on sallow hotel lights, fat lonely ladies at the 3am drive-thru,
neon glistening in oil puddles. I’m that brassy tarnished doorknob you once
cut your finger on, the old man with whiskey on his trousers who loves a young girl or so
You have white scars.
I have white scars.
I’m not very serious ‘bout it all. Makes me a terrible poet,
I say, and gnaw on my knuckles.
You can’t really fake moments

2nd: Self Portrait In An Upper RoomPicture me, if you will, as a saxophone. Not a bright, shiny alto sort of saxophone, strung casually around  a sax section leader’s neck, nor yet a tenor of uncertain vintage, which has for years been fighting a rearguard against its owner’s propensity for sallies beyond the musical stratosphere.
No. Picture a road weary baritone, a cumbersome instrument, whose gruff tones can occasionally be teased toward poetry. You might consider this no more than the autobiographist’s evasive way with facts. Attend! Listen with the inner ear. You might hear faint echoes of tunes this instrumentalist has never been brave enough to explore, preferring too often to rely  on the instrument’s inbuilt tendency to bluster, rather than on the challenging graces of ballad interpretation.
Or, from a slightly different perspective, think again. Think Tubby The Tuba. Danny Kaye’s avuncular voice is woven into the tapestry of my childhood. I shared that clumsy earnestness that Paul

3rd: MantisI thought I was a kaleidoscope of euphoric perceptions,
a sensual overlap of sixteen color-receptive cones on the acid spectrum,
creator of words to describe what only I could see when those sinews melted,
and the ocean waxed at my backdoor. I was bottom-feeding, heat-seeking,
capturing bent men like stunned seahorses boiling in the rainbow coral,
blinking wake of sonoluminescent dazzlement: tight jeans wrapped around their ankles,
faces blue but bubbling dank blood to their lips that sealed a pseudonym—
Then I was tongue-tied like a victim complex: always the receiver and never the sadist
of an infliction self-invented. I was wordless and mosquito sex stagnant,
playing in kiddie pools I called the Atlantic, wanting to tear a hole in reality or literature,
make the currents foam in the shape of wet letters that curved for my diction,
but I am not powerful: I am a shrimp. Not a writer, not a leviathan—
Though I don't think I've come to terms with it yet,
so I'll just keep br

The results are yet another demonstration of the amazing diversity of work to found on dA