Wave

Inspired by the magnificent bossa nova classic "Wave" by the great Antonio Carlos Jobim and by the rugged, beautiful ancient coast near Cascais, Portugal, this is WAVE by Mike Tucker, a brilliant, compelling work of poetry and his 26th book. The only writer of his generation compared to Hemingway, Mike Tucker returns to his roots as a poet--he received Honors in Poetry in 1982 & 1983, while a young poet and writer at James Madison University--and celebrates the spirit of bossa nova in WAVE. A poet, novelist, lecturer and former mercenary, Mike Tucker is the only foreign writer in China since 1949 to lecture on the legendary guerrilla war commander and revolutionary, General Huang Hua, and was interviewed five times on the celebrated, nationwide "Poet and the Poem" radio program on the Pacifica network in America by the Poet Laureate of Maryland, Grace Cavalieri, during his apprenticeship as a poet and writer in Washington, D.C. in the early 1980s. He left America in 1992 to get his dreams as a writer and carried out extensive fieldwork in the rugged, remote highlands of Northern Thailand for his novel SPARTACUS DID THE RIGHT THING, the first of many journeys in Asia, Europe, Africa and the Near East. Mike Tucker has lectured on America foreign policy, counterterrorism, guerrilla war, the Chinese Revolution, the origins of the Vietnam War and literature in the United States, China and Southeast Asia. The Visiting Scholar on Counterterrorism at James Madison University in fall 2006, he was on missions with American snipers in the Near East and Hindu Kush after September 11th, in the Iraq War and the Afghanistan War, and was under fire with Spanish counterterrorists in the historic Siege of the Banco Central in Barcelona in 1981. Mike Tucker's most recent book of poetry, FIRST LIGHT, is a BEST BOOKS OF 2018 selection by the WASHINGTON INDEPENDENT REVIEW OF BOOKS. He lives in North China and Portugal.