New Releases by Raymond Keen

This book reverses everything you believed about the brain and aging. The brain doesn’t deteriorate as you get older: your brain can improve with age. It makes sense: older people have experienced more in life than younger people. They’ve had to adapt to many more changes, so older brains are potentially more flexible. Your brain has virtually infinite possibilities for learning and making connections, and this capacity can increase as you age. This book shows you how. It will enable you to become a much better thinker and communicator as you progress through life. You will be able to: Remember names, facts, and figures using easy to learn memory techniques. Achieve higher levels of creativity, clearer organization of thoughts, increased concentration, better communications, and dramatically improved memory and creativity. Read more rapidly and with greater retention. Learn principles and techniques used by great minds in the business, sports, and creative worlds. This book will show you how to apply these principles for success. With this knowledge, you will be able to achieve just about anything you want and do it progressively better as you mature!

"The Private and Public Life of King Able" is character-driven. I had a vision of an old king, almost beyond time, abandoned in his palace, and utterly clueless about his predicament, as he is being watched throughout the play by anonymous men in masks. These men are dressed exactly alike, their white coats and masks projecting an insidious and possibly malevolent clinical detachment. No poem could contain the depth of my vision of such a foolish old king, helpless against the evil/impersonal forces covertly marshalled against him. The action of the play proceeds ineluctably, as the words of King Able fly up in seeming irrelevance to all that transpires. King Able, the only actor in the play who speaks, cannot say anything to help or ameliorate his situation. The silent men who watch King Able move and work efficiently and effectively to get what they want. So the drama uses language as a counterpoint to meaningful and effective action. The only character who speaks seems to be caught in his own "fog of language." King Able uses language to distract, deny, distort, and obfuscate his real situation, about which he remains clueless. His language of "self-comfort" is his mortal but unacknowledged enemy, an enemy of the truth.

Contemporary poetry of the thoughts, feelings, quandaries, and wonder of an American poet aware of the darkness and light of the 21st century.