Jim Natal's first collection, In the Bee Trees (Archer Books, 2000) was a finalist for the Pen Center USA and Publisher's Marketing Association Ben Franklin Awards. A second collection, Talking Back to the Rocks, was published by Archer Books in 2003. His poetry was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2007 and 2008, and has been published or reviewed in Bellingham Review, Runes, Pool, Reed, The Paterson Literary Review, Poetry International, and The Los Angeles Review among other journals. Natal's work also has appeared in many anthologies: Crazed by the Sun; Chance of a Ghost; Mischief, Caprice and Other Poetic Strategies; Blue Arc; Beyond Forgetting: Poetry and Prose About Alzheimer's Disease; Open Windows; What Have You Lost?; So Luminous the Wildflowers; and Fresh Water. He also is the author of three chapbooks (Explaining Water With Water, Oil on Paper, and The Landscape from Behind) and two handmade limited-edition chapbooks (A Collector of Infinity and Rain in L.A.).

Books by Jim Natal:

Other poems on the web by Jim Natal:
Six poems

About Memory and Rain:

"Memory and Rain is one man's journey undertaken beneath roiling skies, from Lake Michigan to Santa Fe to the beach at Marina del Rey to sun-dry Arizona, his twenty-year old daughter beginning her own journey, his mother descending into Alzheimer's, nearing journey's end. He cuts a switch and walks the path between them, 'backward through the brush . . .erasing my tracks behind me as I go.' A fine book of deft, deep, sure-handed and big-hearted poems."
—Dorianne Laux

"Style is never a matter of word choice or sentence construction; rather, it reflects the way in which a writer engages the world about him. Whether in Montaigne, in Chandler, or in Montale, it is that play of an individual mind across the subject, that unique consciousness and voice, that we seek. And this is what we have in Memory and Rain"
—James Sallis