Publisher's Synopsis
Written in rain-soaked notebooks folded and tucked into the back pocket of worn-down corduroys, this collection of poems tell the tale of a ragged band of East Coast wanderers out to find that mythical American freedom of the West that had grown in their child-like city-dweller hearts. Embarking on a pilgrimage that left two cars dead by the gray shoulder of the mid-west, they sought to prove to themselves that there was still some magic, some lost idea worth searching for, waiting to be nurtured, to be rediscovered, no matter what got in their way.
From the crevice beside the sliding-door of a sputtering van headed west, under the open skies of flat Missouri fields, by the broke-down roadside periscope darkness of snow-flurried Kansas plains at 2 am, over the snowy-peaked quiet towns and frozen streams of Berthoud Pass, among the rain-pattered Nevada highlands and hot dry painted desert expanse, through the abrupt and raging blizzards of Sierra Nevada peaks on Route 88, to the bluer than blue shores of the Pacific Ocean and back again, Go on, Breathe Freely by Tom Pescatore will take you across the American landscape and into its forgotten ghost towns, through its greatest cities, past unforgiving mountains and near endless forests, to the very soul of America. This poetry scrapbook of journal entries, character sketches, haiku, musings, ramblings, and letters chronicle the seven-thousand-mile journey over a roller-coaster two weeks, following in the footsteps of pioneers that came before.
