Bøger i Poet Laureate serien

With an unwavering ascendancy of the austere, Thom Caraway's What the Sky Lacks explores the negative capability of uncertainties and mysteries in a landscape of ruthless severity and elusive beauty, "a world built of unknown language." While witnessing the stark refuge of cottonwood shelterbelts on a field's ragged periphery, listening to the tender weight of empty freight cars rolling through the night, or recounting the dream of a wrecker wherein human warmth exists only in the transient sounds of strangers, a soul transforms into "an instrument of pure light, a circular machine of illumination." The spiritual discipline of recognizing beauty in a world of desolation emerges sheer, unadorned as the rugged territories in the northern badlands obliterated by merciless blizzards, unburnished yet dazzlingly beatific in wintry ruminations of a faith weathered out of wreckage. Instead of hungering for uneasy solace, this enduring poet vows, "We'll rename the world." (Karen An-hwei Lee)

In the Spokane tradition of Vachel Lindsay, Chris Cook sings. Before you register the dark humor, the sharp satire, or the elegant constructions of the meter, you'll notice the music of these poems. Whether at the park, in memory, or elsewhere on the periphery, Cook writes large-hearted poems that remind us how poetry moves: from ear to mind to heart.

Mark Anderson's Scarecrow Oracle opens by "Going Backwards to Where It Starts" and then takes us forward through the speaker's childhood into his early adulthood, traveling through time as he stays rooted in place-the Spokane Valley, The Empyrean Coffee Shop, the Rockford Fair. The question the speaker is always asking is how to live in a world steeped in loss. Early in the collection, the young speaker asks a dandelion this question, and in response, "it lets go of everything it has ever been." Towards the end, the older speaker, less stunned now by the dandelion's quick vanishing, tells us as he performs the ordinary act of making his bed, "I want to be ready to be a ghost or a nothing..../ And when the time comes I part the curtains / and let in the astonishing day." Anderson's book translates the silences and fears of childhood and early loss into a series of images that answer, beautifully and without explanation, his difficult question.- Laura Read, author of Dresses from the Old Country