Hello and Welcome.

Hello, I am David Booth

I am a poet. I live in San Francisco with my wife Ingrid and our Calico cat, Bella. My blog, Sacred Pedestrians, features at any one time twenty or so pieces (poetry, prose, artwork) representing my concerns as a writer.

When I first wrote the phrase “sacred pedestrians,” I was thinking about the oxymoronic nature of our humanity. We’re secure and vulnerable, dynamic and static, spiritual and profane, free and stuck. Sacred things are elevated, while the pedestrian is commonplace and routine. Though no list of binaries can say what one is, I think we’re all sacred pedestrians. I made this blog to write about us—and our bundles of contradictions.

In Tell Me Please, What’s the Matter, I combine memoir, poetry, fiction, and essay to explore masculinity, artistic creation, family bonds, and the role of cultural narratives in shaping identity amid social discord and global uncertainty. While this hybrid approach can reflect a chaotic mind, it also creates moments of profound reflection, highlighting both the instability of contemporary life and the grounding achieved by paying attention. The thirty-five pieces collected here play out tensions between doubt and meaning making, offering readers a deeply personal yet universally resonant meditation on selfhood and creativity.

Too Bright To See – A Book of Poems

Too Bright to See is my debut book of poems. If you read it, my influences may leap out at you. In any event, I have written forty-five small stories meant as poems, with their music and what that Russian writer from my childhood, Alexander Green, called the “Beautiful Unknown.” What I know is that these poems are about love, marriage, aging, sickness, mortality, parents and children, siblings, trauma, pandemic, racism, sexism, roses, typography, murder, technology, God, social entrepreneurship, sobriety, humor, and at least one time capsule. I hope you will pick it up.

What people are saying about Too Bright to See

David Booth’s debut poetry collection is a bold dance that deftly moves the reader through a series of unexpected and emotional narratives, some of which I can’t shake and don’t expect to anytime soon.

Adrian Todd Zuniga

Author of Collision Theory and creator of Literary Death Match

"Emotional Narratives"

"Surprise After Surprise"

Offering surprise after surprise on each and every page, David Booth’s debut collection, Too Bright To See, sets out the welcome mat for a deep and moving cast of characters: shelter-in-place friends, lovers, caretakers, Puck, sixth graders, grandmothers, Harry Hay, a sacred pedestrian, Gilda Radner, and many more. He writes, “It’s good to see them. It’s good to see everybody.” Here is a writer standing at an opened door, ready to let us in, too.”

Toni Mirosevich

Lambda Literary Award winner and author of The Takeaway Bin

This debut collection combines a fiction writer’s command of story with a poet’s passion for language and line. Rather than constrain humanity’s tumbling mind, this book collaborates with it, by turns leading and being led. A narrator enters a story, moving parts around like furniture. A third-person prose piece takes an abrupt left turn into an elliptical first-person poem. Bits of language appear in the margins, refusing to be absorbed or ejected. With virtuosic dexterity, Booth paints us in all our luminosity and shadow, inviting us to finally, fully inhabit our extravagant imaginations like a child who crosses into the rising sun straddling a hippopotamus. Booth’s work carries us toward a horizon too bright to see.

Sarah Rosenthal

Author of Lizard

"A Horizon Too Bright To See"

Recent Blogs

The Translucence of a Wing One Day

Baritones sing about countries as animals aching to eat one another while forcibly curbing their appetites. Tenors sing as counterpoint those animals with their shifting cells and gooey innards learning not to hunger after each other in the first place. Some...