It’s a word that reminds you you’re not the world. You’ve never liked it. You prefer the ecstatic frenzy of “and,” the heaping of spaghetti and chocolate pudding and mango onto plates without any fear of stomachache. But now you’re three and a half decades into your journey, and you’re in a dark wood, and you think it’s Dante’s but fear it’s Frost’s, with two paths diverging, and you can’t follow both and be one traveler, and you ask why you have to pick, and you’d like to split yourself in two, maybe a sober daytime Apollonian you and a drunken nighttime Dionysian one, and you try to do this, but there’s a limit to how far they’ll walk away from each other. You seek a middle way, even though it might send you over the rocks, straight into the brambles. You don’t care how much they scrape.
-”OR”; OR/And
"In uncommonly accomplished prose and verse, and with a remarkably audible, canny, and compelling voice, these poems perform the sort of surprises that feel like long-held, subconscious wisdom just now coming into our apprehension, just now, when we most need such wisdom."
—Scott Cairns, Slow Pilgrim: The Collected Poems and Anaphora: New Poems
“These poems do not equivocate desire and faith. Pitas has created a questing volume of dancing, blazing language to speak shibboleth.”
—Jon M. Sweeney, coauthor, Meister Eckhart’s Book of the Heart
"Every page of this book confides brilliantly–through folklore, fantasy, reality—all sentiments possible, in words never imagined before. Or/And is a perfect title because the poems embody so many kinds of experiences: personal, social, magical—even those of crisis “or/and” loss –they all brighten the room with flair and originality. Author Pitas teaches us to be new, to be unafraid, to transcend the limits of language. I say, 'Now THIS is poetry! Thank you!'"