RUNWAY LIGHTS: CALLING HOME "All our thoughts are dreams mid-air constructions collapsing, even as we climb the ladder to reach them." The Dreams of Atoms This book of poetry by Charles Chase is the second of four that will bear the title "Runway Lights." In this collection, Chase has brought together poems under the theme "surreal and humorous poems." As the author says in his Note to the Reader, "This book is about the absurdity of human beings, how funny they are to watch, and how mysterious, sad, and lonely it can feel to be one." Some of the poems in Runway Lights: Calling Home are overtly strange, otherworldly, surreal. Others are laugh out loud funny. But most of the poems in this collection describe a "familiar" world of events and feelings from a perspective that returns to the everyday world its original awe-inspiring qualities. As a whole, Runway Lights: Calling Home is an expansive inquiry into what it is to be human. However, rather than conducting a clinical examination into his subject, where the analyst is separate and removed from the object being examined, Chase works from within, using his subjective response - his personal experiences of being human - as both catalyst and password to a world of breathtaking freshness and mystery. As readers, we enter - or return to - a realm where beauty exists at every turn, where wonder is pervasive, emotions are raw and true, and the imagination is free to roam.