Russell Salamon knows we are immortal beings with a future,
and the sooner we act like it, the sooner we can meet in the highly
aware civilization. Which could be tomorrow in Los Angeles, where
he lives with his wife and two children and one granddaughter. Poetry
is a way to make conversations with the future and the past. As friends
return to new bodies we can speak with Shakespeare and Bach and
Mozart (and invalidate them by saying you only live once). Poetry is a
place where one can be honest about one's amnesia. Russell writes
poems about us as immortals. This makes him invisible and annoying,
but what he aims for might be true. He has written thousands of poems
after beginning in 1964 at Fenn College in Cleveland, Ohio. He has
written a novel about the revolutionary Sixties in Cleveland, (Descent
Into Cleveland, Words and Pictures Press, 1996) about poets bringing
culture to the rusted-out industrial indifference to returning Tibetan Lamas
and composers and living eternities.

He is a prizewinning poet of the Passager Prize for 1996. He has been
featured in dozens of places including radio, and has published over 200
poems in magazines such as Daybreak; Uncommon Ground; Saint
Petersburg Russian American Anthology; California Quarterly; The
Listening Eye; Puckerbrush Review; Peckerwood; Sunstone; Passager;
Trace; Dare; Riverside Quarterly; etc. He was born in the former
Yugoslavia in the Serbian section sixty miles west of Belgrade to a
Rusinian (Rusyn) priest father and Ukrainian mother. He came to the
USA in October 1953 to Kent, Ohio, after an interesting voyage on the
original Queen Mary, which sustained damage in huge North Atlantic
waves.

Growing up in Yugoslavia seemed like living in the !2 th Century and
Russell has written poems about that time in his collection entitled,
Breakfast in the Twelfth Century. Other titles of poetry books are:
Redwoods in the Rain; Technical Difficulties at the Resurrection;
Love Poems for Older Women; Say Those Stars Slowly I Am Still
Learning; Lighting The Eyes Until They See; Nothing Bad Happened
We Only Died. In May 2006 deep cleveland press brought out his
Woodsmoke and Green Tea, a collection of 47 new poems, 64 pages,
paperback, perfect bound with color cover painted by the author. The
future is endlessly beautiful, it's present time we must account for.
Contact him at: thesalemons@earthlink.net