A Feast for the Heart
author: M. Genereux, NJ
NIGHT CONNECTIONS is a verbal smorgesbord for the mind and heart. Each delectable verbal entree has been carefully prepared, seasoned and served by Dick Summer, a longtime DJ and storyteller with an amazing voice. Each story is flavored with some aspect of that most basic of human needs: to connect with another human being. You'll taste love, longing, lust, despair, humor, joy, regret, loyalty, warmth, loss, wonder and hope, especially hope. You'll come away surprisingly satisfied. So sit back, get comfortable and... bon appetit!
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A believable and personally relatable blend of poetry and prose
author: Jan S. (Boston)
Night Connections is a stunningly crafted selection of stories about people navigating their love relationships. The vignettes that comprise it represent the places where imagination decorates memory, character intersects circumstance--- so believable and personally relatable is each. In so many of the stories, it's as though Dick Summer is recounting our own intimate experiences, but in a narrative style that celebrates rather than exposes them.
The strength and beauty of this personal audio is in the brevity and yet descriptiveness of the vignettes. Each scenario is a meticulously constructed and rippingly lean sketch of people in their situations. But don't equate the brevity of the pieces in Night Connections with anything like sparseness. Nothing is lacking here. The studies are profiled generously, but economically, in descriptive language and potent imagery that paints poems, that shares people's circumstances and histories as biographical affirmations. And Summer does this while injecting each story with a sense of currency, a sense that these circumstances are happening right now. He balances the past and present tenses in a way that make stories relevant. By addressing his listeners in the second person pronoun, we are allowed to feel that it is we who are the subject of each story. He is talking as much to us as about us. And that makes each story a personal gift, whether it's our story or not. The sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit feeling of inquiry infusing each vignette--- the what-if's and maybe's of love relationships--- invites us to ponder how things otherwise might have turned out. The inclusion of that kind of wondering captures a human characteristic we all share in loving and in reflecting on loving.
Night Connections is a beautiful and seamless blend of poetry and prose, one that features dozens of memorably evocative lines that make one wish that he'd thought them up first. Each story ends with one of these powerhouses--- strings of parting words that steal a breath, nudge a memory, take pause to reflect, and give cause to connect. This is the hallmark of truly great writing.
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