Reddit reviews Discount Travel Guide: to the Balkans, Turkey, and the Caucasus

In real life my name is Ernest Whitman Piper IV, and I am a writer and editor. Most of my published writing has been travel-related. My first book was an "adventure guide" which teaches young uni graduates and gap year types how and where to travel long-term, and why it is worth doing. It's I think available still on amazon and smashwords still though it's wildly out of date at this point. My second book was a brief memoir about producing a musical in Istanbul, and it is available nowhere, because I wrote it for my friends. (Though I recently talked to my mom and she suggested stripmining the both of them for material and making one ur-memoir about all my time spent in the Eastern Mediterranean, and it's not a bad idea.) I am currently working on a novel about a murder mystery, also set in Istanbul, and that's all you're getting from me on that.

My travel writing has also appeared in the Stranger in Seattle, as well as in the Daily Sabah, an unabashed propaganda outlet for the curent government of Turkey. And while I really cannot stand the current government in Turkey, there was a brief window where they paid me to travel all around the Balkans and Turkey and write whatever I wanted, which was pretty cool.

In terms of poetry I've got...not much? I'm very shy about my poetry. I have not been published anywhere for a long long time, other than like...my uni's lit journal ages ago. I've published here on the sub mostly. I credit this community for getting me back into it.

I started out trying to write like slash have been deeply influenced by:
Mairead Byrne, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Rumi, Nazim Hikmet, Shakespeare, Ocean Vuong, John Ashbery, Shel Silverstein, Derek Mahon, Catullus, Allen Ginsberg, Mary Oliver...I have to stop now or this list is going to get very long indeed

The modern poet's in a strange boat on a foreign sea. I think the mission of any poet should be to map the connections between islands and currents we didn't know were nearby. Poets celebrate useless things and magnify the unseen. I agree with /u/gwrgwir in that a poem should ask that its readers use their brains -- like basically a poet's task these days phrased in practical terms is "why read or write a poem when I could just scroll through the internet for hours unreflectively?"

The most recent thing that inspired a poem was a particularly brutal hangover.