Help Thermidor thwart the Devil’s Businessmen, avenge the Black Dahlia, foil Jack the Ripper, save Queen Antoinette from Saint Guillotine and stop Jim Jones from murdering Jonestown.  Read this book.

published by Time Being Books (January 2014)
cover image by David Van Gough

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Review at Pittsburgh City Paper
Review at poeticdiversity
Review at Small Press Book Review
Review at Chamber Four
Review at Verbicide
Excerpt at Poetry Super Highway
Interview at Madame Perry’s Salon 

In this collection of poetry and prose topics such as beauty, aesthetics, art, atrocity, mortality, history, envy, revolution, sexuality, entropy and the need for Grace are contextualized by the infamous fates of three famous women: Queen Marie Antoinette, Ripper-victim Mary Jane (Marie Jeanette) Kelly and Sharon (Marie) Tate.

The following are some of the questions the author raises: What’s in a name — and what’s in a nose? Is there a war on beauty? Is war this world’s god? What inspires a mob to behead a queen? Who will save the Garbo With a Thousand Faces? What do Jack the Ripper and Iago have in common? Is art moral or autonomistic, and what net can catch it? Can a coffin become a lifebuoy? Why was Sharon Tate killed by the Mansons? Will the Scarlet Pimpernel rise again? Is it better to recite or re-sight?

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Sharon Tate and the Daughters of Joy is like watching academia and history being blown to pieces with a pop-culture shotgun. Herrle combines known elements in new forms, turning his prose into the literary version of an M.C. Escher lithograph. This is a witty, wildly imaginative and very ballsy homage to all things estrogen.
— Gabino Iglesias, Verbicide magazine


Herrle plays his words like jazz, refusing to follow the most traveled way. His intellect, rather than intimidating readers, draws us in and invites . . . Then there are the swirls of intensity that force the reader into places that might reflect too much truth: the essence of worthwhile poetry.
— Ward Abel, author of Cousins Over Colder Fields and member of the band Abel, Rawls & Hayes


I felt like Scrooge being led by the specters: the changing of the guides, scenes of time and place, and mix of poetry and prose. Herrle paints using whatever he deems necessary — literature, history, science, art, nature — masterfully balancing the vile and debauched with the beautiful. [A] work of blinding brilliance.
 — Jennifer Perry, creator of Madame Perry’s Salon, and owner of Lone Wolf Communications, LLC


Profound and exquisite . . . the musings of a vast intelligent brow that scales the dark cupboard shelves of time in pursuit of a rationale for the death of beauty . . . expounded through a thousand historical and pop cultural references . . . prefer[ring] “Zorro black” over the Pimpernel’s scarlet. It’s been some time since [I’ve been] so inspired by poetry.
— David Gough, painter and creator of Man/Son and the Haunting of the American Madonna


A brave literary contribution.
— Jane Freese, librarian and author of In Madera Canyon

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