Eric Warberg went to Hollywood to make it big. For many years, he was successful, until directing a few box office bombs made him virtually unemployable. When an opportunity presents itself for a return to his hometown of Memphis, to direct a small, independent film, it is a return to his roots in more ways than one. Despite the fact that he’s greeted like a star, his homecoming is bittersweet. The novel begins on the onset of filming of what is temporarily called Memphis Movie. From day one, Eric feels stuck and unable to find his creative spark. He is helped along by a large cast of characters, some from his past and some from the filmmaking industry, including his partner, Sandy, who wrote the script for the movie. Their open relationship will be challenged by Eric’s return to his roots. Memphis Movie reads like a Robert Altman film, with many story strands making up the rich tapestry. The novel's central question: will Eric lose or find his soul in Memphis, a town where soul has so many meanings?

Opaque Melodies That Would Bug Most People is filled with young, vibrant poems from a wise voice. The poems often wax reflective, filled with the historicity of experience, yet always returning to the now. Thus, Mesler's collection is defined by beautiful immediacy, intimacy, and urgency. Constantly, these poems remind the reader what it means to be human, to be alive and living surrounded by a multitude of beating hearts and breathing lungs. While each poem recounts a snippet of life, together the poems create an earthy blanket that connects readers to a single mind whose voice throughout remains delicate, concrete, and vital, like an old friend. The verse engages the commonplace and the abstract with equal measures thoughtfulness. Each piece builds and builds until, by the end, the reader has experienced a life, and come away refreshed, having experienced hopeful energy.

So you think you know the 60's? Mesler's collage-novel of stories, poems, and "music reviews" will carry you through the entire rollicking and devastating gamut of that period, using the microcosm of Memphis, city of the blues--and city where Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated to end what many viewed as the innocence of that time period. If there were such a genre as a coming of age collage, this would be it, for it gives us a ride that is by turns comic, frazzled, inane, and tragic.

Mesler's pen brings us a poetic study in agoraphobia; a unique, engaging collection that is unforgettable.

Tincture Journal is a quarterly literary journal based in Sydney, Australia and collecting interesting new works of fiction, poetry and non-fiction from Australia and the world.

TALK is nouveau sexy, nouveau comic, nouveau neurasthenic--it's just plain nouveau nouveau as we follow Jim, sesquipedalian owner of a fashionable bookstore who happens to be undergoing a wee bit of a mid-age crisis

Deep roots and a soaring crown-this is the arc of Corey Mesler's poetry.

With poems like "Strictly Blowjob" and "The Cancer of Believing You're in Control," acclaimed writer Corey Mesler has made a book that adjoins sex, love and social connection in their many manifestations, from meditations on The Beatles, death, pharmacology, and infidelity, to "the holycow feeling/of just being human and/satisfied like a goddamn poem."