Lost and

A book of "found" words allows us to peep into the lives of those who wrote them. It's unique format captures the people and the places of the western US that I know and love. I liked this book very much.

Lost and by Jeff Griffin is a collection of discarded memories. Griffin operates the Slim Princess Holdings, a publishing house and is an associate at Griffin Moss Industries. He graduated from Iowa Writers' Workshop and currently lives in Nevada.

Life is filled with strange coincidences. Earlier today I wrote a review on a poetry collection by a bartender who apparently had no educational background in poetry and I made the comment of not knowing what to expect: something good or an experimental project. It turned out to be pretty traditional. From Griffin, I was expecting something traditional with a Southwest theme. Instead I got the experimental poetry. Poetry is a bit of a stretch, but maybe something poetic would be a better description. I read this collection twice hoping to come up with at Ah-ha moment when everything miraculously made sense...the Rosetta Stone for this book. That moment didn't come.

I discarded the idea that this was some how poetry and things made a bit more sense...kind of. There is something in here that captures the reader and holds him or her to this book. The book is mostly comprised of letters, drawing, documents, partial book pages, charts, and photographs. These items were discarded by their owners and found by the Griffin, in the desert, who organized them into a book. It is the work or items of many people that make up this book. It would be like buying a public use computer and scouring the hard drive for information in the form of emails, Tweets, Instagrams, and Facebook postings of all the users and reading that information. There is a certain feeling of guilt while reading that you are digging into peoples' private lives. Some of the items are generic but others are very personal. It is interesting and maybe even compelling in a non-traditional sense.

I am still unsure of what exactly to make of Lost and but it was well worth the read and the reread. It has a voyeuristic element to it, but at the same time you also think, there can't be anything wrong with it because it is all random items found blowing around the desert. Lost and is a book on the surface that has little to it other than a collection of discarded paper, but where the book succeeds is below the surface. The more you think about what you have in your hand the greater its value becomes. Most of the letters and notes are handwritten, and for the last decade, or more, how many people have written letters by hand? And when people do write letters by hand it is something important to them – to create a permanent record of their thoughts rather than an electronic message that has no permanent form. These are little bits of people’s lives that they deemed necessary to create a permanent form either as writing or as a photograph.

I was worried that I wouldn't have much to say about Lost and, but apparently I was wrong; I could probably keep going for a while. This work is will grow on you, more so after you have read it and thought it though. I would be lying if I said I was not disappointed when I first started the book. I am, however, very glad I stuck with it. It is a fairly amazing experiment.

Quite recently I reviewed a book of poetry that I didn't much enjoy.  I'd prefer not to mention it by name as it doesn't need any sort of promotion (even bad publicity).  But what that book thought it was (according to the author), this book is.  And that is: Poetry of a most unusual sort, out of the ordinary ... extra-ordinary.

Jeff Griffin hasn't written a book of poetry as much as he has 'collected' a book of poetry by people who haven't realized what they have helped to create.  Griffin has collected scattered papers from abandoned homes and trailers around the desert and selected a few to present here.  It is moving and whimsical and a masterful method of identifying what it means to be 'man.'

Right from the start, I was hooked with "a budgie's linguistic development."  What a great assortment of words and meanings!  Once hooked, I didn't want to finish the book and read through it in one, patient sitting.  It was a voyeuristic feeling, peeking in on the private writings of those not intending to be published.  The twenty pages of letters and notes to and from Est'ee and Tony, detailing their love and fear and physical abuse, were mesmerizing and ended with the simple drawing "How to set a table" that was itself tremendously powerful and lonely.

The inclusion of well-selected photographs is beautiful.  The images of a construction site, taken from indoors with ghostly reflections of the photographer is a haunted moment of time, frozen in the faded colors of a cheap print.

The title itself, Lost and, suggests something that isn't finished, which is a perfect metaphor for what Griffin has done.  There will continue to be people picking up and leaving pieces of themselves behind, as long as there will always be greener pastures or the possibilities of a better life somewhere else.  And the struggles that mankind faces, those of Tony and Est'ee and all those others represented here, are eternal struggles that aren't likely to have an end, until man himself is finished.

Looking for a good book?  This poetic collection, Lost and, by Jeff Griffin, is a beautiful assortment of 'found' poetry and philosophy.

This collection is made up entirely of found photos, letters, and documents. Discarded or lost memories…deserted in the Mojave Desert. It is definitely a strange little book. A curated ethnography of sorts, and yet somehow a bit disconcerting.

When a book continues to come to mind, I always think it a good thing. Somehow it has challenged or impacted or introduced something new to me. This is the case with this book…and strangely, I am still not sure what I want to say in this review. Give it a try. It's definitely a different type of book. Or maybe just different for me.