Father of the Red Grotto Used Bookstore

“Gillespie captures the lyric beauty of ordinary things. The flamenco steam of a coffee cup dances between reflections of fathers and daughters and waitresses serving up peppermint scented love. Each poem celebrates the simplicity of the superficial while ever so subtly paying tribute to the powerful depth that comes from bearing witness. It’s one of those collections I will read again and again.” —Nancy Murray, author of One Child for Another “Father of The Red Grotto Used Book Store is a book populated by fascinating women, a book through which the pronoun she runs like a chant. Doyle-Gillespie’s language is tight with potential energy, and when he lets his associative leaps spring—bookbinding to handfasting, a father’s bookstore to Masada, marginalia to sunbathing cormorants—they pull a reader along, gasping.” — Jennifer Browne, lecturer, Department of English, director, Frostburg University’s Frostburg Center for Literary Arts “You will want to read Ed Doyle-Gillespie’s poems out loud. Over and over again. His words are hypnotic. His words are honey-sweet and smooth. Yet there is a rawness to his words, they will make you sweat. My favorites in this collection are “Women in the Half-Moon Cafe” parts One, Two, and Three. They are interspersed throughout the collection and when each one shows up it feels like seeing a dear friend.” —Alexandra Hewett, author of Shimmer