The poems in this collection explore social and ecological struggles, personal and public nostalgia, family and solitude and seek to balance it all with hope.
Grant Clauser is the author of four previous collections and has won the Cider Press Book Award and the Dogfish Head Poetry Prize. He lives in Pennsylvania where he works as an editor and writer and also teaches poetry at Rosemont College.
These finely crafted, deeply evocative poems written with a tenderest heart, questioning mind, and an acutely observant eye, invite us to join the speaker on a trek across history, across intimate landscapes of relationships, human and animal courage, love and grief, global brokenness, and unexpected grace. – Doris Ferleger, author of Leavened and As the Moon has Breath
Whatever the topic of his luminous poems–family, nature, childhood or fly fishing–to name a few, Grant Clauser knows that are all related. It is this understanding and wonder that undergirds these poems. Whether the characters in this book “smash atoms/ into each other/ trying to find god” or tie flies because “water is music/ I want to stand in,” these poems reach for the place where the known world meets the realm we sense but cannot know. Grant Clauser is a poet who knows the importance of vision, both in the sense of observing what is around us and in being attuned to the worlds to come. “Trust me, this is the world we deserve,” Clauser says. We will be more deserving of this world if we heed these wise and luminous poems. – Al Maginnes, author of The Next Place and Music From Small Towns