John P. Portelli’s The Lost Coyote is a profound meditation on dislocation as a metaphysical state, an unflinching document of the human spirit’s endurance amid catastrophic temporal and geographic rupture. This collection transcends mere memoir or political commentary, operating instead as a rigorous philosophical inquiry into the dialectic of belonging and exile, where the concept of “home” is eternally reduced to the “in-between.”

Portelli employs a stark, almost cinematic lyricism to expose the scars of history, weaving personal memory—fragments of past loves, Mediterranean seascapes, and domestic moments—into the massive, impersonal horror of geopolitical violence. His poetry performs a constant deconstruction of time, where “yesteryear” and the present are fused by perpetual trauma. The clock face—a recurring visual and thematic motif—serves not as a measure of linear progress, but as a circular witness to a history that ceaselessly repeats its atrocities. The titular “lost coyote” is the ultimate symbol of the alienated subject: an existence “unnoticed,” howling at a universe that remains taciturn. Love, when it appears, is framed by its own futility and transience, a brief “fictitious embrace” or a fragile desire caged by a world that demands a “perfect silence.”

This is a necessary, formidable work that establishes Portelli as a major voice charting the enduring sorrow and moral complexity of a globalized, yet fragmented, world.