Publisher's Synopsis
Does your newspaper have a police blotter? It's a column of short stories about minor crimes and disturbances. In the blotter you find tales of normal people with normal lives who have, for some reason, gone off the rails.
Aflame with anger,
he set fire to the carport
of her new lover.
The police blotter is funny, ugly, absurd, sad: in short, very human. And it lends itself to haiku: a brief, structured verse form that cuts through routine facts to the heart of the matter. A woman's young son comes home smelling of marijuana? The haiku reads:
The end of childhood.
She smelled it as pot smoke
on her twelve-year-old son.
What's the appeal? It's the knowledge that any of us could end up in the blotter. We're all human. If the right temptation catches us in the wrong state of mind, who knows what might happen?
Open this book, and see. Within you'll find over 250 tales of the human condition taken from newspapers across America - and over 100 illustrations.
Who knows? Maybe you're in there already.
