Excuse the use of cliché, but Kirby Wright is a natural born leader whom one can follow for as long or as briefly as one wants, like the informative lesson learned in the waiting room of a doctor’s office or a stimulating conversation picked up at a café, bar or retreat. As Joseph W. Bean’s [Book Critic, The Maui Weekly] Foreward to Kirby Wright’s Hong Kong Man, Selected Poems [Lemon Shark Press (2015)] alludes, seeds the poet Wright plants in your psyche will linger and haunt till the day you die, the day you burn their remains or the day you use them.

I hope the openness Kirby has shown us as consumers of his craft and his person will ignite the passion to reorganize the Che Café on the University of California at San Diego Campus in La Jolla, California this year.

John Rubens

Hollywood, California

January 2, 2015