Poe Ballantine’s risky, personal essays are populated with odd jobs, eccentric characters, boarding houses, buses, and beer. He takes us along on his Greyhound journey through small town America (including a detour to Mexico) exploring what it means to be human. Written with piercing intimacy and self-effacing humor, Ballantine’stories provide entertainment, social commentary, and completely compelling slices of life.

Things I Like About America: Personal Narratives by Poe Ballantine

Biographies & Memoirs

Ballantine, Poe

Historical

Hawthorne Books

God Clobbers Us All

Set against the decaying halls of a San Diego rest home in the 1970s, God Clobbers Us All is the shimmering, hysterical, and melancholy account of eighteen-year-old surfer-boy orderly, Edgar Donahoe, and his struggles with romance, death, friendship, and an ill-advised affair with the wife of a maladjusted war veteran. All of Edgar's problems become mundane, however, when he and his lesbian Blackfoot nurse's aide best friend, Pat Fillmore, become responsible for the disappearance of their fellow worker, Beverley Fey, after an LSD party gone awry. Ballantine's own brand of delicious quirkiness and storytelling is smooth and compelling, and God Clobbers Us All is guaranteed to satisfy Ballantine fans as well as convert those lucky enough to be discovering his work for the first time.

Literature & Fiction

Genre Fiction

In this follow-up to God Clobbers Us All, Edgar Donahoe is back for another misguided adventure. When Edgar is expelled from college, he accepts his pal Mountain Moses’ offer to come to a Caribbean island. Once there, Edgar cooks at the local tourist resort and falls in love with Mountain’s girl, Kate. Embroiled in a dangerous love triangle and stalked by a mysterious local, he turns to medicine man Cinnamon Jim for help but even the supernatural may not be able to save him now. Ballantine's quirky humor and captivating prose have drawn comparison to Kerouac and Bukowski, but his voice remains inimitably his own in this raucous, riveting adventure.

Decline of the Lawrence Welk Empire: A Novel (Edgar Adventures)

United States

Poe Ballantine’s second collection of personal essays follows, and expands on, his acclaimed Things I Like About America. Ballantine’s world is a crazy quilt of odd jobs, eccentric characters, boarding houses, buses, and beer, rendered in the author’s by turns absurd and poignant voice. The Irving” briskly details the author’s diabolic plan to punch John Irving in the nose after opening for him before an audience of 2,000 people at the prestigious Wordstock Festival. Wide-Eyed in the Gaudy Shop” takes readers on a wild ride through Mexico as Ballantine meets and marries his wife Christina. Blessed Meadows for Minor Poets” offers a devastating take on the author’s life as his years of struggle to secure a major contract for a short story collection end in catastrophe. The writer the Seattle Times called part Huck Finn, part Hunter S. Thompson” brings a blistering wit and shrewd observation to this composite portrait of an unconventional life.

501 Minutes to Christ: Personal Essays

Fans of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood and John Berendt's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil will embrace Poe Ballantine's Love and Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere. Poe Ballantine's "Free Rent at the Totalitarian Hotel" included in Best American Essays 2013, and for well over twenty years, Poe Ballantine traveled America, taking odd jobs, living in small rooms, trying to make a living as a writer. At age 46, he finally settled with his Mexican immigrant wife in Chadron, Nebraska, where they had a son who was red-flagged as autistic. Poe published four books about his experiences as a wanderer and his observations of America. But one day in 2006, his neighbor, Steven Haataja, a math professor from the local state college disappeared. Ninety five days later, the professor was found bound to a tree, burned to death in the hills behind the campus where he had taught. No one, law enforcement included, understood the circumstances. Poe had never contemplated writing mystery or true crime, but since he knew all the players, the suspects, the sheriff, the police involved, he and his kindergarten son set out to find out what might have happened.

Love and Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere: A Memoir

History

Eddie Plum, who insists he’s been unjustifiably committed to a California psychiatric hospital, manages to finally escape after fourteen years of incarceration to start his life anew. On the run, he holes up in a sheltered barrio on a bluff above the Pacific Ocean owned by his wealthy but unsympathetic father. Here he meets Sweets, the telepathic dog, laments the loss of Sofia, his madhouse lover, and plays the horses at the Del Mar Racetrack. Eventually he meets up with an old friend, Shelly Hubbard, a fellow horseplayer, record collector/dealer, and hardcore loner, who tells him about his brother, Donny, dead at the age of eighteen from a tragic dive off a thirty-foot La Jolla sea cliff known as the Clam. Eddie discovers a family secret and wants to help, but by then he’s already embroiled in the psychotic incident with the Tijuana prostitutes, the madhouse lover, and the police, who are hot on his tail. Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride has nothing on Whirlaway, a hilarious novel of escaped mental patients, horseplayers, and record collectors.

Whirlaway

Humor & Entertainment

Humor

“Meet the new guide on the lonesome highway. Poe Ballantine’s wry voice, clear eye, hilarious accounts, and lyrical language brings us up short by reminding us that America has always been about flight, and for most of its citizens it has been about defeat. His wanderings, drifters, bad motels, cheap wine, dead-end jobs, and drugs, takes us home, the home Betty Crocker never lived in. We’re on the road again, but this time we know better than to hope for a rumbling V-8 and any answers blowing in the wind. The bus has been a long time coming, but thank God it has arrived with Mr. Ballantine aboard.” Charles Bowden, author of Blues for Cannibals and Blood Orchid.

No Talking to Imaginary People

Religion & Spirituality

Independently published

Interferometry is a technique by which a beam of light is split and when reunited and focused on a target of interest measures wavelengths, determines refraction indices, captures and extracts information, manipulates moods/thoughts/dreams, and disables dissenting, uncooperative, or unwanted people from long distances. The basic principles of interferometry were discovered in the nineteenth century (Young, Mach-Zehnder, Michelson-Morley). Refined over the decades, interferometry has become the go-to weapon for governments and militaries alike, first because it's nearly undetectable, second because most people resist believing in things they can't see. Directed on unwitting subjects (especially in military cities like San Diego, where I grew up) since at least the 1950's, those who have suffered its effects are often and -- most conveniently for the perpetrators -- labeled crazy.

Torpedoes D'Amour

Gobshite Quarterly Summer/Fall 2018, #31/32 features: Every Edge a Centre is an ongoing series of mythopoetic reasoned rants and essays: Nebraska novelist & O. Henry nominee Poe Ballantine looks back at a 1960s relationship with a legend in "Every Edge A Centre: Another zucchini bar, Ken?" (in Eng./Sp./Croat.); Adelaide-based poet & essayist Judith Steele writes about escaping the age of Trump, even in the Outback, in "Every Edge A Centre: Travelogue Monologue, Flinders Ranges, So. Oz." (in Eng./Sp./Croatian); Germ. film scholar Janina Bocksch & Barcelona-based Oz essayist & cineaste Adrian Martin write about Charles Laughton's classic noir & chess in "Night of the Hunter: Black is to Move" (in Eng./Span./Croatian). We have two comics: Award winning Little Beirut, Oregon poet & artist Leanne Grabel graces us w/a life of Dorothy Parker for children of all ages, "A Sad Story About a Big Brain: Illustr." (in Eng./Span./Icelandic/Croatian). Rotterdam-based illustrator Tânia Cardoso collaborated w/ writer Joana Vardona for the comic book "Garandinha"--excerpted (in Eng./Portuguese). & we have an Indonesian Dragon fr. Japanese artist Midori Oki, & Croatian illustrator Dusan Gačic has a very pictoral "Diary" (in Croat./English). Bestselling Swiss novelist Christoph Keller, who divides his time betw. St. Galen & N.Y.C., offers us 5 Jazz flash fictions inspired by jazz classics & the lives of the musicians who wrote them ("Solo Flight"/"Blood Count"/"New Rhumba"/"My Friend Mindy"/"Sound Seekers"). Fr. Bowling Green Ohio, Michael Lohr gives us orig. bad boy & eternal rock-'n'-roller Edgar Allen in "The Ghost of Poe" (in Eng./Icelandic/Finnish/Sp.). Little Beirut writer Davis Slater observes a very very very angry carney in "9 Kinds of Sucker" (Eng./Span./Croat./Japanese). & we've got poets fr. all over: Greek poet & editor Dinos Siotis ponders paradoxes of "Faith" (in Greek/Eng./Lithuan./Span./Japanese). Croat. editor & poet Ivan Herceg visits "Limbo" & thinks "About Impossible Faces" (in Croat./Eng./Span./Lithuanian). Award winning Croatian poet Lana Derkač comes to a "Conclusion" & makes an appointment with "Doctor January" & enters a "Covenant with Dust." Also fr. St. Galen, Clemens Umbricht visits "The Room of False Things" & hangs "Untitled" on a wall & gets lost in "Rain-washed Amsterdam" & then takes "A Stroll in July" (in Germ./Eng./Croat./Spanish). Award winning Slovenian poet & E.R. doctor Veronica Dintinjana goes to midnight mass to visit the "Cathedral Lions" & then loiters "Outside the City Gates" (Slovenian/Eng./Lithuan./Russian/Croat./Spanish). South Oz expat Jan Herschel has lived on the Left Coast since 1982, & makes a wistful wish in "Add to Cart" (Eng./Span./Russian/Icelandic/Finnish). Adelaide poet Judith Steele, winner of the Red Earth Poetry Award discovers "Quiet" (in Eng./Russian/Croat./Spanish). Little Beirut drive-by poet Pecos B. Jett tells us the one about "Snoring Beauty" (in Eng./Jap./Russian/Finnish/Spanish).

gobshite quarterly #31/32: your rosetta stone for the new world order

Comics & Graphic Novels

Keller, Christoph

Grabel, Leanne

Graphic Novels

Gobq LLC

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Ballantine, Poe. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Ballantine, Poe

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Ballantine, Poe. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Things I Like About America: Personal Narratives by Poe Ballantine

God Clobbers Us All

Decline of the Lawrence Welk Empire: A Novel (Edgar Adventures)

501 Minutes to Christ: Personal Essays

Love and Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere: A Memoir

Love and Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere: A Memoir

Whirlaway

No Talking to Imaginary People

Torpedoes D'Amour

gobshite quarterly #31/32: your rosetta stone for the new world order