People Are Puzzles - by Alastor E George (Paperback)

About the Book

Alastor George has been carefully watching the world, studying its codes, symbols, and people (himself included) for seventeen rich years. In People Are Puzzles, he shapes beautifully subtle poems as he share key human stories.

Book Synopsis

At seventeen, Alastor George was the youngest author Golden Antelope had ever published. Yet his subtlety and depth of experience were impressive even then. The People Are Puzzles front cover, which George designed, illustrates this fondness for complexity: a bonsai brain planted in a old fashioned glass jar surrounded by 18 small hand-written, alliterative "p" words. Each bit of this design is a clue about why or how people are puzzles. How is a human brain like or unlike bonsai? Why is it in a mason jar? Is cursive writing a tribute to past writers, an annoyance to present readers, or both? What's most puzzling for people who are surrounded by passion, politics, poison, progress, paradox, plastic, pathos...? What's alliteration for? These are questions suitable for a young person like Al, planning a career in medicine, but tied to a full range of human experiences.

For Golden Antelope, a press which does a disproportionate number of books by retired folks, George's 44 poems, 3 essays, and 14 art works presented--and still presents--both challenges and delights. Some of the challenges involve technologies which we "seasoned seniors" react to the way George's peers, born in the aughts (oughts?) might be expected to react to ... cursive writing, or wooden butter churns. Other generational challenges involve assumptions. We grandparental sorts aren't accustomed to specifying our pronouns; George's agemates joke, half in earnest, about our misgenderings. We remember airports without TSA screenings; today's teens accept metal detectors in schools as normal.

Even if you are a mere quinquagenarian--in your fifties--you may feel vaguely disoriented at times; our author mixed symbols from across centuries and cultures, assumed shared assumptions, or experimented with unusual poetic forms. (If you're a poet, you may occasionally say, "This line clunks." But you'll recognize that most lines soar.) The challenges Al George's youthful work presents to readers are real, but meeting them, considering them, is one of the core delights this book offers. People are puzzles, after all.

And Alastor George's life so far has given him unusually varied experiences to process. Though now in college and headed toward a career in medicine, he'd lived in Colorado, Hiawaii, Pennsylvania, Missouri and North Carolina by the time he was eight. His family background was eclectic. His father, who had lived as a missionary's child on a Navajo reservation, later worked as a musician and on pipelines; his mother studied in India, worked her way up a corporate ladder, but eventually left that world to help run a used bookstore. Alastor George grew up adjusting to new accents, assumptions, and teaching methods, finding symbols in new landscapes, losing and gaining rich friendships, meeting bullies, befriending puppies, planning a career in medicine. In his teens, he came out as gay and as an advocate for "misfits" like himself.

Digging in, discovering connections, feeling what others feel, these are timeless, ageless traits of poets--and of healers. Alastor George had been carefully watching the world, studying its codes, symbols, and people (himself included) for seventeen rich years when he put this collection together. In People Are Puzzles, he shaped symbols and questioned codes as he shared human stories, especially his own. Now, as he leaves his teens and plans his future as a doctor, he continues to write and sing, and to do what he can to heal this fractured world.

Review Quotes

Alastor George, a multidisciplinary creator whose debut collection grapples with eternal themes, uses imagery-rich language, and intersperses original art bursting with its own poeticism. People Are Puzzles transcends what many find restricting: conventional expectations about adolescence, and the rigor of gender constructs.

Radius Burik, Kansas City based writer, musician, editor

A slender volume graced with occasional color illustrations and photos, "People Are Puzzles" is a compendium of original and thought-provoking verse -- and a bit iconoclastic here and there. Entertaining, fascinating, and impressive for a teenage poet (who must have something like an Old Soul), "People Are Puzzles" is an especially and unreservedly recommended pick for personal reading lists, as well as professional, community, and college/university library Contemporary American Poetry collections.

Midwest Book Review, May 2025