Slaughtering the Buddha

Gordon Osing’s new book Things That Never Happened is brilliant,
soul-deep, questing, and fun. One thinks of Wordsworth’s Prelude
done with a great jazz beat, and then one thinks of all the good books
wrung from a writer’s experience, from a life. The book has the force
of a train rumbling through a vibrant city. Its obervations are startling
and pleasurable even as they disturb. Read it and see.
         Richard Bausch, author of Wives and Lovers

Each of the little ones in the house must find his and her way out,
must face the ordeals of trying to love, must find and enact a self
who is not blindsided by the simplest blandishments of assimilation
in town.     Tom Russell, author of Travelling with the Magi

Osing here draws on the Mississippi Delta blues tradition to advance his
understanding of Poetry, Literature, America and the writer's sense of place therein.

What a powerful little volume Osing has put together. The personal essays—eccentric
and lovingly conceived and penned. There used to be a whole lot more of this kind of
delicacy in American literature. I'm thinking Edward Dahlberg, Kenneth Rexroth, the
youthful William Saroyan. These essays gleaned from journals cross over into poetry
and the poems circle back into the notions and experiences Osing so tauntingly captures
in exciting prose. No sojourn into cultural and intimate geography will ever be quite the
same for me. Al Young

The Water Radical will come to rank with the best of the travel journals,
verse or prose. It’s captivating, and its resolutions are marvelous.     Miller Williams

The Jazzer & The Loitering Lady is a most startling autobiography, really.
A trip to the harsh, beautiful geography of ‘home,’ and the terrifying psychic
territory of his own germination as a man and artist. At times painful, most
often riotously funny, lines jump off each page like cut diamonds reflecting
the clear light of accurate, cutting observation.     Tom Collins, Albuquerque Journal

Gordon Osing

Gordon Osing has taught at the University of Memphis since 1973. He founded there The River City Writers
Series, now in its twenty-second year. He is the author of From the Boundary Waters and A Town Down-River.
He has also translated widely from the Chinese. His travels to China inform his other verse and journal
collection, The Water Radical. “The Center is everywhere attention gathers,” he has said of his work in verse, prose,
and translation.