"This collection of stories by Kurt Luchs pursues its comedic quarry with the ruthlessness of a pussycat trying to get out of a cardboard box. Luchs, who has written for august literary organs such as The Onion, The New Yorker, and McSweeney's Internet Tendency, and even been published by some of them, is an inspired comic writer in the tradition of P.J. Wodehouse, S.J. Perelman, and Woody Allen, for whom not only the world but language itself is a source of constant delight. Even the hilarity he generates is not an end in itself; the convulsing diaphragms of his laughing readers are in his hands a remotely operated musical instrument bridging the woodwind and percussion sections."--Cover

Kurt Luchs is from Michigan. He has written humor for the New Yorker, the Onion and McSweeney's Internet Tendency. His books include a humor collection, "It's Funny until Someone Loses an Eye (Then It's Really Funny)", and a poetry chapbook, "One of These Things Is Not Like the Other". His first full-length poetry collection, "Falling in the Direction of Up", was recently issued by Sagging Meniscus Press. He won the 2019 Atlanta Review International Poetry Contest, the 2021 Eyelands Book Award, and a 2022 Pushcart Prize. This book won a James Tate Poetry Prize in 2021.

Poetry. Kurt Luchs is well-known for brilliant comic writing (such as his previous IT'S FUNNY UNTIL SOMEONE LOSSES AN EYE), but he has always written poetry, and in recent years his accomplished verse has appeared in dozens of journals. In FALLING IN THE DIRECTION OF UP, his first full-length collection, his voice is lyrical, direct, mysterious, funny and awestruck by turns, often in the same poem. Its four sections form a redemptive arc: from harrowing childhood memory, to closely observed nature lyrics and meditations, through a poetic high noon teeming all at once with the surreal, satirical and soulful, coming at last to a powerful sequence of love poems that range from joyful to mournful to sensual to bemused. Here is the work of a poet writing at the height of his powers, what James Wright called "the poetry of a grown man."

This second full-length poetry collection from the author of Falling in the Direction of Up finds him diving deeply and with great assurance into perennial themes and concerns: life, love, death, time, the nature of consciousness and reality, the world around us and the many worlds inside us. He offers a plentiful variety of verses about love lost and won, intimate encounters with nature, the life of the spirit, and oblique insights into our current cultural moment. His voice is equally at home with lyrical free verse (the approach in most of these poems) and the occasional formalism. The book is divided into three sections. The first, "Night Thoughts & Death Songs," focuses on existential questions and includes elegies for the poets Robert Bly, Brett Foster, Adam Zagajewski and Charles Simic. The second, "Other Lives, Other Endings," contains mostly nature lyrics featuring all manner of creatures. Finally, "Mortal Loves, Tribes, Families" reflects on relationships-with lovers, family, friends and fellow citizens.