15 Comfy Reading Chairs
- Book Lovers Wish List, BOOKS & HOME, READING ESSENTIALS
- October 9, 2017
CONTRIBUTOR
Beaird Glover
Beaird Glover grew up feral on the mean streets of Obion, Tennessee. Switchblade mumbly-peg was his sport. Raising Hell the only religion he ever knew. Beaten, abandoned and left for dead in a back-alley dumpster at the age of five, Glover survived on maggots and slimy lettuce until he could claw his way through the garbage and step out into the world again. He slept in a hole behind the city dump and sucked marrow from chicken wings, sharpened his teeth on the bones. He was growing stronger every day, but the stressors of kindergarten were too much. He took to the bottle and became an alcoholic, was addicted to heroin and crystal meth before first grade. He smoked three packs of Marlboro reds a day. Of these early years, Glover says, “I only had one life to live, and by God, I was going to live it.” As a teenager he drifted down to New Orleans, where he was lucky to be employed on a fishing boat, right outside the Delacroix. There he met the love of his life Kim Martin, who plucked him out of the muck and brought him back from the edge. He had lost himself in Hoodoo, Satanism and heavy metal music, was one breath away from selling his soul to the devil, at the crossroads. Glover is much less ferocious now—in fact he is virtually a recluse. When cornered, he growls illusive about his past and evasive about his future, but he and Kim are happily married and they live in a proper house with two beautiful cats. Still haunted by his darker days, it is only through his writing that Glover interacts with outsiders. The close and savvy reader will divine his ghosts and cheer his deliverance as revealed in the pages of Unconscious Knowledge—from the tumble-down shack where he made his first home and the inferno it became, to life on the lam and finding happiness. And love. And the will to keep on trucking.
