James H. Duncan

For more than a decade, poets J Lester Allen and James H Duncan have inspired and supported each other from afar, occasionally meeting on the road for a beer and a story before disappearing across another wounded horizon. The poems here are mile markers crossing that ever-changing landscape, passing through cities and small towns where there's a bar, there's music, jazz and smoke and laughter, neon splashed across a midnight highway, or perhaps there's a quiet bed, someone to love, working days of solitude and somnolence, each with stories that remain long after the moments pass, like stars above an ancient highway awaiting the next great adventure.

Poems from and about motels, hotels, and motor inns from NY to LA and beyond, by Kevin Ridgeway and James H Duncan. Published by Alpine Ghost Press."...by the end of its days the motel housed only the suffering and the burned-out, the addicts, the broken, the poor, and lost, and after a fire that too disappeared, as all things do in time."

This anniversary anthology celebrates ten years of poetry and prose at Hobo Camp Review, an online magazine and gathering place for the road-weary storyteller. We specialize in travel stories, Beat-ish poetry, something with a dark twist, or something that'll make us laugh, just so long as it has a sense of vagrancy, a little sparkle and a little dust, shadows and angles, anything that sounds good by the firelight with a train calling in the distance. Be original. Be honest. Be on the move. Remember what happens in between and tell us all about it. Welcome to the Hobo Camp, fellow transient This anthology features the work of writers like Bud Smith, Ally Malinenko, April Michelle Bratten, Dena Rash Guzman, Destini Vaile, Hasan Jamal, Hillary Leftwich, Kevin Ridgeway, Rachel Nix, Rebecca Schumejda, and many others.

Like scenes witnessed through passing windows at night, these fifty stories reveal love and lives realized and destroyed, the mundane terrors and desires of modern life, loneliness, heartache, and hard-won redemption. Through sprawling cities to small desert towns, the players in each tale are you and I, your friend, your enemy, all of us just actors in minuscule films any stranger passing by may see and experience, and perhaps remember for the rest of their lives. From the author of What Lies In Wait and The Cards We Keep, these flashes of fiction explore the strange and desolate landscape of humanity's desire for comfort, for communion, or for something just a little more. "Nights Without Rain is a collection that wanders. It peeks into alleys, diners, and bedrooms, revealing what most of us never share. These stories build on each other without ever touching, each nodding at what's fostered or broken in small moments. James Duncan shows us what uncertainty looks like when we're all just waiting for rain."- Rachel Nix, editor of Cahoodaloodaling"Reminiscent of Hollywood's era of classic films, Nights Without Rain hops into the lives of different characters like jumping trains, each searching through giant cities and small towns, capturing snapshots of small lives and inevitable consequences. Duncan is a master of turning words into imagery and directing stories about life and all the "what ifs." The audience can't help but sit back and read each scene through to the very end." - Hillary Leftwich, editor of Heavy Feather Review"In Nights Without Rain, James gives the reader glimpses of humanity -from 'screaming, haranguing Americana' to 'a derelict honeymoon of stupid love'-without frills, but with genuine understanding. Nothing sentimental, just the messy, sublime, ridiculous state of being alive."- Kate Garrett, editor of Three Drops Press