To ken the craft of Ken Craft, reader, open here and hear the music of a (mostly hidden) bird in every poem. And notice the exquisite balance of humor and poignancy, compression and conversation, artifice and clarity. Notice the way these poems force us to slow way down, and notice. Notice that happiness is simply paying attention; that that's the happiness these poems search for, consistently find, and expertly offer up to us. -Paul Hostovsky, author of Is That What That Is and Selected Poems Ken Craft is a master of metaphor-spade-cast skies, open-windowed life, window screens whispering their meshed tongues, Swiss cheese's negative space-with the originality of a bracing tonic that affords a worldly perspective that is engagingly transparent. Reminiscent of the best work of Thoreau, James Wright or Wendell Berry, Craft's poems astutely sum up situations ranging from dying frogs to the way a Maine lake can be viewed by changing positions. A marriage of nature and philosophy, they are a delight to the imagination and the intellect. -Joan Colby, author of Kithara Prize-winner, Ribcage Few poets meditate as beautifully as Ken Craft. This is a book to be savored slowly, lingering over intricate turns of language that lead us to contemplate this sweet, brief life. These poems rise to a bottomless sky only to be consumed by the cold logic of universe and stars, of Einstein and God. -Ruth Bavetta, author of Flour, Water, Salt

The best in poetry and short stories Clover's editors can find. Based in Bellingham, WA, this all word publication features writers from all over the globe. Fresh, innovative and relentless in its independence.

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

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.