Charlie Mehrhoff

We have come to believe Charlie Mehrhoff

In WE HAVE COME TO BELIEVE, Charlie Mehrhoff invites us to confront the crucible of our fractured world with "the highest of all the art forms," the practice of love and forgiveness. Through gentle directives and poetic paradox, he challenges us to journey a little further beyond ourselves, to "break out the engines of beauty", and discover that the Way is not so far away as we may think--we need only start from the boundlessness of our own hearts. "[Mehrhoff's] philosophy arrives without sacrificing the image; on the contrary, it serves in the delicate placement of image-but never gratuitously. One feels the tracks of fasting Taoist mountain monks through urban alleys within a single phrase. These poems hold the grand ineffable in graceful counterpoint to the irony of quotidian phenomena, all while celebrating the curiosity of our fragmented condition." -Clint Frakes, from the foreword