This book is a meditation on the profound emotional truth that from birth we are, in the words of the poet, "filled with the lie of immortal life." Death is ordinary. Pain "waits like a squatter" even as we take pleasure in "sun-seized walls" and a tomato vine's "yellow star-blossoms." It is a lament that rages against a past "woven with hemp and loss," where we took insufficient delight in the beauties of the world and took for granted the joys that life conferred upon us. The beauty andprecision of the language in these poems—and the universality of thetruth contained in them—raise this book from the depths of sorrow to an appreciation of the wonder of a life that contains pain but is also "the watery songs hiding in orioles' breasts."
—Ruth Bavetta, author of Flour, Water, Salt
BOOKS
The Indifferent World (2016)
A childhood home haunted by the past, a farm-animal veterinarian’s bloody operations in the field, an unemployed cousin stranded by time and hope—Ken Craft explores the indifferent world in all its manifestations. He chronicles the stories of others who have faced indifference with grace, too—the bus driver reading Irish literature for night school, the old Mainer preparing his homestead for winter, even Leo Tolstoy’s last dash from death, which caught up with him at a train station in Astapova. In turns contemplative, humorous, and quixotic, this debut collection is a quiet celebration of everyday life in our preoccupied world.
