Cloud Watching in the Inferno is a collection gathering the best pieces by author Westley Heine written between 2022 and 2024. The poems and short stories are set in the past and the future using surreal imagery and dark humor to capture the contemporary existential angst of life in the 2020s. Full of colorful hard-nosed characters, themes include heartbreak, AI, sex, death, America, insecurity, poverty, religion, ecological collapse, disease, alcoholism, madness, and space travel.
Westley Heine is the author of Busking Blues: Recollections of a Chicago Street Musician and Squatter through Roadside Press (2022), a short story collection 12 Chicago Cabbies (2021), and volume of poetry The Trail of Quetzalcoatl (2016). He has featured twice at the Green Mill Poetry Slam in Uptown Chicago, and is the new host of the poetry open mic at The Gallery Cabaret in Bucktown every 4th Saturday. Most recently Roadside Press has released his new poetry collection entitled Street Corner Spirits, audio excerpts of which are now available on most streaming services under the same title.
He's been a taxi dispatcher, a roadie, a deliveryman, a squatter, a street musician, a grocery clerk, a chambermaid, a novelist, a painter, a metal head, a Boy Scout, an insurance investigator, a jailbird, a farmhand, sold tickets to the symphony, sold plasma, been unemployed, and been a filmmaker. Life is always creating new characters inside him, but always a writer. He's rambled from Wisconsin, to Chicago, Europe, Texas, Mexico, California, and everywhere in between. Let in the light. Let out the fire. Instagram: @westleyheine
"Cloud Watching in the Inferno is searing counterculture literature in this age of extinction. Flip the bluesman a quarter as Heine chronicles tragic and comedic dysfunction along with a dash of hard boiled observations featuring refuges not unlike a shallow grave. There's no escaping, just look into the abyss and smile."-Mike Zone, author of Skull My Daisy and The Earth was Shaking for Days
