A wildly imaginative novel about a man who is reincarnated over ten thousand lifetimes to be with his one true love: Death herself. “This book made me laugh out loud. And then a page later, it made me sob. Reminiscent of Tom Robbins and Christopher Moore, Poore finds humor in the dark absurdities of life.”— Chicago Review of Books First we live. Then we die. And then . . . we get another try? Ten thousand tries, to be exact. Ten thousand lives to “get it right.” Answer all the Big Questions. Achieve Wisdom. And Become One with Everything. Milo has had 9,995 chances so far and has just five more lives to earn a place in the cosmic soul. If he doesn’t make the cut, oblivion awaits. But all Milo really wants is to fall forever into the arms of Death. Or Suzie, as he calls her. More than just Milo’s lover throughout his countless layovers in the Afterlife, Suzie is literally his reason for living—as he dives into one new existence after another, praying for the day he’ll never have to leave her side again. But Reincarnation Blues is more than a great love story: Every journey from cradle to grave offers Milo more pieces of the great cosmic puzzle—if only he can piece them together in time to finally understand what it means to be part of something bigger than infinity. Darkly enchanting and wisely hilarious, Michael Poore’s Reincarnation Blues is the story of everything that makes life profound, beautiful, absurd, and heartbreaking. Because it’s more than Milo and Suzie’s story. It’s your story, too. “The most fun you’ll have reading about a man who has been killed by both catapult and car accident.” —NPR “This book made me laugh out loud. And then a page later, it made me sob. Reminiscent of Tom Robbins and Christopher Moore, Poore finds humor in the dark absurdities of life.” — Chicago Review of Books “Charming . . . surprisingly light and uplifting . . . It reads like a writer having fun.” — New York Journal of Books Michael Poore ’s short fiction has appeared in Glimmer Train, Southern Review, Agni, Fiction, and Asimov’s . His story “The Street of the House of the Sun” was selected for The Year’s Best Nonrequired Reading 2012 . His first novel, Up Jumps the Devil, was hailed by The New York Review of Books as “an elegiac masterpiece.” Poore lives in Highland, Indiana, with his wife, poet and activist Janine Harrison, and their daughter, Jianna. Chapter 1: The Wise Man of Orange Blossom Key Florida Keys, 2017 This is a story about a wise man named Milo. It begins on the day he was eaten by a shark. The day didn’t begin badly. Milo woke up before sunrise, tucked his fifty-year-old self into a pair of shorts, and walked out to meditate on the beach. His dog, Burt—a big black mutt—followed. Milo sat down in the sugar-white sand, closed his eyes, and felt the warm, salt breeze in his beard. He took note of his ponytail feathering against his back, and seagulls crying. That’s what you were supposed to do when you meditated: notice things, without really thinking about them. Milo was not a particularly good meditator. He cracked open a beer, and watched the sun come up. Meanwhile, as always, the more he tried to think of nothing, the more he thought of ridiculous, noisy shit like his big toe, or France. Maybe he would get a new tattoo. He drank his breakfast, noticing the ocean, welcoming its ancient indifference. He tried to match its breath—the breath of time itself—and fell asleep, as usual, on the beach with his beer and his dog, until the tide rolled in far enough to wet the sand under his ankles. He was, perhaps, the crappiest meditator in the world. But he noticed this, accepted it, and let it humble him. Humility was one of the things that made him a wise man. He walked back to the house to open a new bag of dog food. The shark that would eat Milo in a few hours was miles away, at that particular moment. It patrolled the surf off St. Jeffrye’s Key, looking for manatees. The shark knew it was hungry. This required no thought. The shark lived in the moment, every moment, in a perfect equanimity of sense and peace, meditating its way through the sea without even trying. Milo worked in his garden for a while. He played with his dog and read a book about fossils. He went online and spent twenty minutes watching dumb videos. Then he drove his old pickup truck to St. Vincent’s Hospital, because visiting the sick is an important part of a wise man’s job. He took Burt with him. Petting dogs was good for people; it was a scientific fact. Burt was a wise man too, in his way. All animals are. On this particular day, Milo and Burt visited Ms. Arlene Epstein, who was dying of being a hundred years old. She was asleep when Milo arrived, and he stood there looking at her for a minute. Hospitals had an unfortunate way of reducing people, he thought. Looking at Arlene Epstein in her bed, tissue-delicate, you’d never know that she had once been a legendary bartender, keepi