Ken Craft

Reincarnation & Other Stimulants: Life, Death & In-Between Poems Ken Craft

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 and precision of the language in these poems-and the universality of the truth 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



In his third collection, Ken Craft captures memory and experience with a clear eye and flashes of dry wit. The poems grapple with attachments, the passage of time, landscapes, and what it is to be a son, a neighbor, a person. The reader enters, with all her senses up, into scenes with the vibrancy of "liver-colored leeches" and the sharp "grit of Boraxo powder," scenes recounting life's diminishments and small victories.



-Sarah Sloat, author of Hotel Almighty