Colin Dodds's Blog
May 27, 2025
Heaven Unbuilt - 2025 definitive edition
At 970 pages, it’s 20 years of poetry, a booster seat for toddlers, and the last book of poems I’ll ever sell you. If you’re interested, I’ve written about how the book came about, my retirement from poetry and some of the reasons at No Homework on substack.
September 16, 2023
The Reign of the Anti-Santas
Just in time for the holidays of a curious year –
Whatever happened to Christmas? The shocking TRUE story they don’t want you to hear!
Elvin the elf is the ultimate North Pole insider. For more than seven decades he’s been at the heart of the action at Christmas. In his time, Santas have come and gone – through labor shakedowns, corporate malfeasance, scandal and assassination. Now, after a surprise escape from federal custody, Elvin’s ready to tell the whole story – about Santa, his legitimate and illegitimate children, the Wall Street manipulations that warped Christmas, the internet colossus that almost ended it all – and the daring elves who helped a retired Santa come back to save Christmas, at least for now. The Reign of the Anti-Santas is the real, unauthorized story of Christmas, and it will change how you look at the holiday forever.
Publication date: November 16, 2023
May 19, 2022
Pharoni – a new novel coming in September!
When the body of Harry Injurides – playwright, provocateur and bodybuilder – washes up on a beach, his friends are shocked, but not altogether surprised. But when they meet to mourn Harry, he shows up and says he’s been resurrected.
Pharoni is the story of those friends. Tommy Pharoni tries to overcome his shock by writing about his friend’s resurrection, and accidentally starts a religion. Roy Sudden starts a tech empire based on digital empathy and digital pain, drawing in billionaire investors, femme-fatale programmers, and tsunamis of capital. And, Roy’s on-again, off-again girlfriend Maud works in secret to bring radical justice to the most neglected and abused corners of society.
As Tommy’s religion grows, Roy and his backers try to take control of it. The battle, about more than doctrine, engulfs Tommy’s marriage and threatens his life, leading to a conflict with strangely humane results that no one could predict.
REVIEWERS can get an advance DRC here.
READERS can preorder Pharoni here or here.
There will also be special offers, events, and more fun around the launch of Pharoni, which you can find out more about by signing up for my mailing list.
EARLY REVIEWS!
Completely fresh and utterly surprising, Pharoni is an off-the-wall novel that will keep you scratching your head until the last unpredictable scene.
– INDIES TODAY (5/5 STARS)
(T)he storyline itself is ingeniously mysterious… miraculous spectacles in quick succession… sharply limns… the spirit of New York … provocatively mocking the ambition of artists…
– KIRKUS
Filled with fascinating ideas… technology transmitting pain… that a modern-day religion would be subsumed into corporate “wellness” … he writes about them with zest.
– INDIE READER
A mercurial story that takes many satisfyingly surprising twists and turns… religious, social, psychological, and criminal processes come to life… intrigue and wry humor… a strange journey, indeed.
– MIDWEST BOOK REVIEW
Pharoni, with its philosophical and social commentary, shows the face of the world that we often ignore… captures readerly attention until the very end
– INDEPENDENT BOOK REVIEW
October 7, 2021
Forget This Good Thing I Just Said
Get It on Your Phone Now!
What’s going on? What do you need to hear? How can you move forward?
Finding an answer may be as simple as swiping left or right.
Forget This Good Thing I Just Said is a new experience, based on an old kind of book – the collection of short sayings, or aphorisms. By combining several hundred original aphorisms with the ring-oscillator software used in random-number-generating technology, Forget This Good Thing I Just Said offers up a completely unique experience every time you open it.
It’s something literary, philosophical, and a little magical to brighten up your screens.
Available on the Apple App Store!
or as a traditional book now!
Could your phone
be a source of contemplation
and delight?
Forget This Good Thing I Just Said – FAQs
What it is
It’s a book, an app, a conversation, am oracle perhaps. But above all, it’s a series of chance encounters.
How it works
A collection of more than 900 original aphorisms meets the ring-oscillator software used in random-number-generating technology. The result is that one aphorism follows another, but always in new sequences, so a reader never has the same experience twice, and no two readers have the same experience. As new patterns emerge, or seem to emerge, the import and meaning of the work changes over time.
Why it exists
It’s an exploration. It’s an experiment. What it finds or helps you find is what it’s for. Let’s all find out together.
Why it’s on your phone
Everything’s getting reduced to small noise on a small screen, from the King James Bible to the theatrical cut of Lawrence of Arabia. Maybe by starting with small noise on a small screen, something may grow.
What it’s like
A conversation with a smart, long-lost friend who has big news, and keeps changing the subject.
A reading experience so unpredictable
that even the author doesn’t know
what will happen
How to read it
The app is best (coming soon). But the website (also coming soon) is also good if you have no money to spare. And the book is good if you’re trying to get away from screens. For the book, devise a way to get around it in a random fashion. This could involve flipping a coin, or feeling your way from page to page and line to line based on a tingle in your thumb.
Who made it
Matthew Dublin and Colin Dodds.
Who gets those cool stickers
Anyone who asks nicely, and promises to share
VIEW PRIVACY POLICY HERE
December 26, 2020
The 6th Finger of Tommy the Goose
It’s 1991 in New York City.
It’s the perfect racket.
See the ‘true’ story of gangsters, extra-terrestrials, consumer electronics, and the marketing campaign that brought it all crashing down.
Also available on Vimeo.
March 17, 2020
These Days
It’s a long way of saying FREE BOOKS. That’s what it is.
I hope you’re all well, and more bored than worried.
May 7, 2018
From seaside resorts, cocktail parties and the hearthsid...
From seaside resorts, cocktail parties and the hearthside comforts of domestic bliss to dive bars on the fringes of unemployment and the disreputable hinge-points where every universe is an alternate universe, Spokes of an Uneven Wheel is a compact, ambitious work of poetry. Due out from Main Street Rag Publishing this July, it’s the culmination of years of work, and decades of hard questions and hard-won development as a poet.
You can buy it here: https://mainstreetragbookstore.com/product/spokes-of-an-uneven-wheel-colin-dodds/
“When I read Colin’s work, one of his own lines comes to mind: ‘What persists / is glad amazement.’ His work consistently delights with humor, inventiveness, a blessed dose of sarcasm and, yes, wisdom (despite his best intentions). We are all ‘born for that other thing,’ and this is that other thing.” – Sharon Mesmer, author, Greetings from My Girlie Leisure Place
You can buy it here: https://mainstreetragbookstore.com/product/spokes-of-an-uneven-wheel-colin-dodds/
“Colin Dodds’ cataclysm of phrases and lines, broken by a tough guy making good on his promises, has got the Zarathustra thunder of myth and the You Can’t Win resignation of Jack Black (not the singer, the old grifter-writer who sent William Burroughs to the interzone). He provides us with sharp knifes of the low life mind and a cathartic liturgy genuflecting for an exit. Spokes of an Uneven Wheel speaks for noses out of joint, joints out of town, and entire towns out of luck. And we are there too, among the overcast of characters. Maybe we’re at the helm of a ship that sunk before it was built. Or maybe we’re prisoners not of walls, but expanse, free to roam forever with zero chance of escape. Being bad at things is the one thing we’re good at. Like a singer songwriter who’s masterpiece depends on laryngitis and a guitar in the pawnshop, in total exile from easy street. But exile from is also exile to, where despite the bleak economics, overbooked disappointment calendars, and a landscape of scapegoats, we prevail together. Life is uneasy, dark, and essentially impossible, yet here we all are. Under Dodds’ gaze, our existence is the obtained unobtainable which easily surrounds the darkness… sometimes.” – Brendan Lorber, author, If this is Paradise why are we still driving?
You can buy it here: https://mainstreetragbookstore.com/product/spokes-of-an-uneven-wheel-colin-dodds/
Here are a few poems from the book that you can read right now:
http://www.easystreetmag.com/two-poems-by-colin-dodds/
http://adelaidemagazine.org/p_colin_dodds.html
https://thebigwindowsreview.wordpress.com/2018/01/16/colin-dodds-a-fugitive/
https://visitantlit.com/2017/12/18/leasing-in-the-leviathan/
https://hobocampreview.blogspot.com/2018/01/colin-dodds.html
http://www.woodcoin.net/cpem.dodds.pdf
https://www.spidermirror.com/…/poetry-2-poems-by-colin-dodds
https://www.gravelmag.com/colin-dodds.html
You can buy it here: https://mainstreetragbookstore.com/product/spokes-of-an-uneven-wheel-colin-dodds/
March 15, 2017
WATERSHED
Coming soon …
Burning towers, prostitutes in parachutes, and brave young men and women hiding from wireless signals. The future’s about to be born, but who will change the diapers?
WATERSHED is the story of a troubled, pregnant woman, and the two men—a snake dealer with a sideline in secret messages and a billionaire living under a false name—who vie for her. As their struggle takes them through a near-future America of anti-technology enclaves and illegal hospitals, where stockbrokers moonlight as assassins, nurses procure obscure pleasures, a deeper and deadlier mystery emerges.
“The masterfully dystopian WATERSHED unpacks the future of a modern America that, while spectacular, nobody was expecting… It’s a future that, as Leonard Cohen sang, is murder. The revelations of prose in WATERSHED makes that murder enjoyable… one of the few things worth believing in.”
-Two Thirds North
Pre-order it here
April 14, 2016
Novels
A tale about the second American civil war, alternative energy and demonic possession, WINDFALL is part political thriller, part love story, and part paranormal epic.
To all appearances, Seth Tatton is a middle-of-the-pack attorney just keeping his head above water. But he has a side job, killing people for shadowy cabal of politicians, billionaires and military leaders. Even in his secret life, things are not what they seem, because there’s something inside of Seth. And it has big plans for him, plans that it and others like it have nursed for centuries. But when Seth is assigned to watch a troubled young woman, all of those plans fall into question.
WINDFALL was named a semi-finalist for the 2013 Horatio Nelson Fiction Prize.
A book about straddling childhood and adulthood, straddling a fading industrial home town and the information-economy world of our attenuated aspirations, straddling the love for a friend and the urge toward self preservation, Another Broken Wizard is a portrait of Worcester, Massachusetts—its place in the 21st century and its past.
It’s a hell of an assignment: Five months on a New Mexico desert compound to cover the next Jonestown. For one reporter, it could be a career-maker. But when a cult member close to him kills herself, he decides to run for it, and begins a dark and comic journey through sex, drugs, cults, suicide, the end of the world, and what comes after it. It’s all in The Last Bad Job—a book the late Norman Mailer touted as showing “something that very few writers have; a species of inner talent that owes very little to other people.”
What Smiled at Him is the story of childhood friends Lynn and Marv with Caroline, the longtime object of their desires. When Caroline is charged with murdering her husband and son, the murder pursues the friends through their searches for love, stabs at success and self-destructive lapses, in an unorthodox, contemporary mystery.
Reviews and Other Fiction
Poems
Links to more than a hundred of Dodds’ poems, that you can read without any cost or hassle.
Heaven Unbuilt is the sum of roughly ten years of Dodds’ work as a poet. The poems wander the hallucinatory frontiers of experience to the dangerous, unlikely moments of insight for which readers had feared themselves too decent, too well liked and too cautious. The hefty tome encompasses Spill-O’s fitful travels toward grace, down the streets of Brooklyn, over the mountains and across the deserts of the American West, through casinos and churches, to a long interlude in a bar, through grief and into the slow, sometimes reluctant submission to love. The poems in this collection have been published in more than two hundred publications.
“These are very good poems. For moments I could even feel the old feelings when I read them.”
-David Berman
(Spill-O), a poetic alter-ego or astral double along the lines of John Berryman’s Henry, leaps the ramparts of humility to engage the creatures whose shadows shape our days. More grandiose than polite poetry permits, more conniving than a dissipated innocent would attempt and more venomous than mysticism would seem to allow, Spill-O’s honest explorations animate these poems with the heartfelt, desperate love of things that neither he nor anyone can necessarily justify or defend.
Wisdom’s Real Opposite—101 Poems about an Odyssey on a Stool consists of more than ten years of poems written in and about bars. Impossible hopes collide with shabby realities in both starkly lucid and deeply distorted moments. Funny poems that avoid being a comedy routine; severe and extreme poems that maintain sympathy and humanity. Taken together, they represent what the best of books promise—something better than drinking alone.
Can’t Stay the Night—Poems and lyrics written between 2000 and 2006.
The Blue Blueprint is the 2003 literary sensation about the September 11 attacks, the shape of the world and of ourselves, the struggle to love, and the introduction of Spill-O.
