A poem

I'm going through old papers and found a poem I had written many years. I don't know when I wrote it, but since I had used a typewriter, it would either have been in high school or college. In any case, here's my one and only attempt at poetry:

Tilling the Soil

The beast is in the yoke
And I at the harness
For together through muddy fields

of hope and ideas

We Plow

Through the hypocrisy

the stone strewned bureaucracy 

We toil
Turning over old phrases

To reveal implicit mazes

Which dissipate through the

Top soil

Man and beast we work

Scratching the earth

Preparing for next season's harvest

But wait

The beast wheezes and sneezes and

Oh Jesus

Freezes my glands as

Hairy thorns sprout

And tales of Germans flow out

Amidst this beastly transformation

So with a whirling and chirling

And new-born talons churning

The beats-monster is free from my service

To debauch my dreams

With random desire and

Frenzied malice deep in mire

More Julius Katz and Archie On sale now!

 

"The puzzles are clever, and Zeltserman plays fair with readers. Stout devotees will be delighted with this loving homage." Publishers Weekly (starred review)

On sale now for $2.99!

Jury Box review of Detectives and Spies

 

In the March/April issue of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Steven Steinbock offers the following review of Detectives and Spies in his Jury Box column: Zeltserman, who has garnered multiple EQMM Readers Awards as well as the Derringer and Shamus awards, has brought together nine stories, the first four featuring an artificial-intelligence device called Archie Smith, followed by three stories about former L.A. cop Morris Brick and two hardboiled crime stories featuring Hell’s only private eye, Mike Stone. Most of the stories first appeared in EQMM or in its sister publication Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. My favorites are the stories about Archie, especially relevant with AI constantly in the news. Archie, a “highly-sophisticated neuron network,” serves as Watson to private eye Julius Katz in the first two stories, then is passed on to Katz’s sister, international spy Julia Katz, for the next two. Reading these tales is like playing a lively game of Clue, except with more colorful characters and an AI at your side.