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Mar 15, 2020Biblitz rated this title 3.5 out of 5 stars
Strangely incensed that rocker Patti Smith not his partner of 30 yrs Jessica Lange or one of his kids was asked to write the forward of his final work before dying of ALS complications at 73. Feels like a betrayal somehow. There is every sense of a final reckoning in this collection yet no big revelations here - familiar desert images, walking on railroad tracks, stepping on bull thorns and broken glass, sadness, regret without knowing what exactly, unexplained grief, a father picking at old shrapnel scars on the back of his neck. Always a credible actor, the writing gave Shepard an unexpected dimension or heft that suggested someone who would be interesting to talk to, someone who would be nice to know, someone who would get the joke. Women were crazy about him. Shepard was Joni Mitchell's Coyote. Lange tried to keep him away from temptation as much as she could, living as they did away from LA, but the movie industry being what it is must have put him in harm's way more than once, and God never made a writer who would resist temptation.