Southern Arizona Press
133 pages
$8.99

Judge Santiago Burdon delivers you his entrails and bile and treasure in these stories from the inside of his hell. Every story is rough and glorious, bloody and holy, harrowing and comforting. Burdon is as honest about his shortcomings as he is realistic with this world of temporary bliss and constant loss. In the end these characters are all broken and then healed: crushed by their own search for release, healed by their friendships and their unwavering truth. There is a code of those who end up in prison and swim together in this pool of sharks: keep your word above all else. This loyalty and the bravery to keep facing the lacerated face in the mirror day after day elevates the addict and the drug-runner to sainthood, even if the God is an injured fruit bat wrapped in a coat, a stray dog fetching a filthy ball, a van full of cocaine. There are lessons learned from Jingles the panhandler, from a sex-starved divorcee, from the Grim Reaper, from the grizzly bear slashing your throat. There are rings lost in the Vatican which end up on dead Pope’s fingers, there are keys which no longer open the childhood home and an endless doorway to approximations of what home feels like at the bottom of a bottle, a pile of white, a syringe of false peace. After each light crashes its brittle body all over the floor, the alarm blaring and the epinephrine surging, there is the apology and the embrace; there is the forgiveness and the kiss. This vindication, this escape from prison while in a prison of the ruined flesh, does not come from God, but from a friend with a breakfast burrito and a black coffee and a wish for safe passage past the “Border Patrol, DEA, State Police, Sheriff’s Deputies and Local Barneys.” The disguise is complete as you put on the priest’s collar, wrap your neck of costumed grace, and jump onto the “Ghost Pony” and ride into hell as it quakes our dirty cities to the ground.

— Scott Ferry, author of Each Imaginary Arrow

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