Lessons from a Desperado Poet: How to Find Your Way When You Don't Have a Map, How to Win the Game When You Don't Know the Rules, and When Someone ... What They Really Mean is They Can't Do it. - Rilegato

Part memoir, part how-to, all Baxter Black, Lessons from a Desperado Poet is a humorous, witty take on making a living by doing the right thing and trying everything. According to Black—who provides 118 life lessons through the course of the book—success, at least in the form to be had by working outside the system, “does not take a genius; it just requires the persistence of a glacier. . . . Remember, often it is not ability, it’s reliability. The world is run by those who show up.”
A mind-tickling romp through the formation, fermentation, and fruition of the author’s career as a poet in a country where publishing poetry is “practically illegal,” Lessons from a Desperado Poet is instructional for the entrepreneur, inspirational for the ambitious, and entertaining for the teeming masses. In three sections—“How I Learned,”“What I Learned,” and “Why I Was Able to Learn”—the man the New York Times called “probably the nation’s most successful living poet” takes us through everything from his “Basque Infusion” (i.e., the lessons he learned working for a hard-headed Basque) and how he became a self-sustaining poet, to such chapters as “Me and NPR,” “How to Control Your Tech Addiction,” and “Controlling Your Own Life—Big Decisions Like Turning Down Johnny Carson.”
Since it is also a story of continuously overcoming the odds, Lessons from a Desperado Poet leaves a trail of self-improvement and motivational tortilla crumbs that readers will follow with delight—before, that is, squirreling them away in their own cerebral pockets for later use.
|Part memoir, part how-to, all Baxter Black, Lessons from a Desperado Poet is a humorous, witty take on making a living by doing the right thing and trying everything. According to Black—who provides 118 life lessons through the course of the book—success, at least in the form to be had by working outside the system, “does not take a genius; it just requires the persistence of a glacier. . . . Remember, often it is not ability, it’s reliability. The world is run by those who show up.”
A mind-tickling romp through the formation, fermentation, and fruition of the author’s career as a poet in a country where publishing poetry is “practically illegal,”Lessons from a Desperado Poet is instructional for the entrepreneur, inspirational for the ambitious, and entertaining for the teeming masses. In three sections—“How I Learned,”“What I Learned,” and “Why I Was Able to Learn”—the man the New York Times called “probably the nation’s most successful living poet” takes us through everything from his “Basque Infusion” (i.e., the lessons he learned working for a hard-headed Basque) and how he became a self-sustaining poet, to such chapters as “Me and NPR,” “How to Control Your Tech Addiction,” and “Controlling Your Own Life—Big Decisions Like Turning Down Johnny Carson.”
Since it is also a story of continuously overcoming the odds, Lessons from a Desperado Poet leaves a trail of self-improvement and motivational tortilla crumbs that readers will follow with delight—before, that is, squirreling them away in their own cerebral pockets for later use.