Book excerpt: Wildly wonderful and wicked, this collection of poetry by A.C. Calloway takes us on a journey to places few other poets ever dream. Bright and beautiful, dark and mysterious, these works are not for the faint of heart. Blazing memories on farms and ranches, massing the desert and the California coast, you start off and end in a bedroom where a force of nature appears to beg for the chance to read these poems of promise that have been locked away in a secret box. There is heartbreak, emotional upheaval, anguished thoughts of suicide that trickle the fearful reaches of your psyche as you drift through a world where something apocalyptic has or is about to happen, but you are never far from the beauty of grace. Calloway has a way of seeing the ugly with the fantastic understanding that life is to be lived.