“For me, poems are kind of like the AK-47s of writing,”  Grant Peeples said in a recent radio interview.  “Quick, efficient and potentially lethal.”  And his poetry book, My Advice to Pilgrims, released in September 2018  by Mezcalita Press, would seem to embrace this view.

Peeples is familiar with firearms.  A southerner, raised in the woods, he moved to the remote Little Corn Island, off the Miskito Coast of Nicaragua in 1995.  It was an eleven-year saga that honed the razor’s edge on his craft.  “It was a frontier experience,” he says.  “There were no police.  No civil authority.  One needed to be prepared to defend one’s self.”

Peeples is now a working folk musician, with a peace sign on his car, an international tour schedule, and ten albums with Gatorbone Records. But he began focusing on poems, and including them in his shows, in 2016.  “With the start of the election cycle, everything began combusting,” he says.  “I couldn’t write songs fast enough to put out my fires.”

If politics, religion and sex are, indeed, the verboten topics of civil gatherings, My Advice to Pilgrims is the literary equivalent of an eyebrow-raising social faux pas.  The late music critic, John Conquest, once referred to Peeples as “the only songwriter I have ever called ‘ruthless.’”   And it wouldn’t be a stretch to say this is a ‘ruthless book of poems.’ In the cross hairs are man’s assault on the environment, his separation from nature, the mud bog of religious orthodoxy, the president (“manifest in fattened flesh, and hair product”), and his faith-blinded adherents.

Peeples kicks off a ‘bookstore tour’ on Tuesday, September 25^th 5:30 pm at Midtown Reader, located at 1123 Thomasville Rd. in Tallahassee. These shows will be a mixture of poems, songs and storytelling.   The book will be available for sale and signing. Admission is free.

For more information about Peeples, visit www.grantpeeples.com

His books are also available at www.grantpeeples.com and at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.