SISTERSVILLE - A Sistersville man has published his first book of poetry.
"Black Thoughts Burning" are a collection of works from the time Alexander Lloyd King was in high school. He graduated from West Liberty University in July with a degree in broadcasting and communications.
"I've wanted to be a writer since I was 4 years old," said King, a graduate of Tyler Consolidated High School.
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Alexander Lloyd King poses with a copy of “Black Thoughts Burning,” his first book of poetry. The Sistersville native is a graduate of West Liberty University where he majored in broadcasting and communications.
"Poetry was a way to express my ideas without taking a lot of time to do it," he said.
Most of the 70 poems in "Black Thoughts Burning" express contradictions and imagery of isolation and desolation, he said.
"I feel 'Black Thoughts Burning' conveys the sense of light and dark," King said.
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King said he was influenced by Edgar Allan Poe, the famed American writer whose stories and poems of the macabre have lasted from the mid-19th century.
Among the poems is "No Phoenix," which King said depicts the darkness.
A passage is:
"The fire swept away the morgue,
The bodies in my mind
For all the times I kill myself,
A stronger self I'll find.
The smoke, it whips like candlesticks,
Screaming at the night.
A silver lining residue
Will fill the clouds in time
And rain upon the sullied souls
To wash away the grime."
"Black Thoughts Burning" was published by the self-publishers Createspace and sells for $9.99 on amazon.com.
King helps at the family furniture store in Sistersville, Kings Corner. The book, published March 19, is available on amazon.com. and at King's Corner and King's Furniture in Beverly.
King is working on two other books he hopes to publish this year.
An anthology of short stories, "13," will be published in July. "Pretty Circles with Sharp Edges," another collection of poems, is planned in December, King said.
