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SOMEONE ELSE'S DREAMS by John Yamrus

SOMEONE ELSE'S DREAMS

By

Pub Date: Sept. 1st, 1981
Publisher: Applezaba Press (410 St. Louis, Long Beach CA 90814)

Despite its triple-coat of Kerouac-lacquer, its all lower-cased sentences, and occasional grammatical missteps, this novelette of a teenager's growing-up has a kind of pulsing charm. Jack Jamroscz is 19, just out of high-school in 1969 Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. So, together with Rick McNeal (skinny second-baseman, demon piano player) and Joe Monroe (balding, fantastically cool, an artist), he does with a summer what a summer's good for: nursing an infatuation with red-haired Linda Crockett, who loves a poetry-writing shrimp (which is unfair, since Jack writes the stuff too!); trying an amateur theatrical production; and doing nothing particular (""there we were, then, speeding down the wet gooey streets with the car wheels cracking fallen boughs like gunshots""). Yamrus' rhapsody is motored more by the rhythms of longing, of clumsy teenaged embraces of the infinite, than by artistic precision. But he undeniably captures some of the essence of the male adolescent in summer: ""i was the type of man who slept with sad comforts on his pillow. . . who went to bed with the horrors of the world still fresh on his wings, beating like life saddened, like life some-how emboldened and emblazoned. . . ."" Notwithstanding its artsy pretensions, then--a nice little book.