"Why are you so invested in keeping us alive?" This collection insists we're still breathing, there's a beat. Wonder becomes wondrous, "The still symmetry continues," and baby the infinities shine bright. At best, we feel exhilarated by our rootedness," deepened as questions, good questions, 'stream in floods of words that, / like fish scales on furniture, / cling for awhile and shine / the dull way dried tears shine." Here, the promise of Surkan's debut bursts forth. "He wonders" the driving force of Surkan's sophomore effort, "Poetry is such a wounded smell. "What is the minimum required?" Reading Neil Surkan, minimum maximizes the elegant, sparing truth in a poetics where each line is drawn to incise, open, lay things bare. Elegant, unpredictable, inventive, these poems linger long in the memory." Mark Ford, author of Enter, Fleeing Surkan slides effortlessly from quotidian scenes into intimations of the sublime, from probes into his personal and family history to witty conjugations of weather and landscape. "The poems collected in this outstanding volume are alive with quirky but resonant phrases ('Gnomes // lazing on pea gravel / beside a breeze-blocked truck'), with haunting character sketches and glimpses into both the mysteries of nature and the whirligig motions of a restless imagination.
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