Description
Winner of the 20th Annual Blue Lynx Prize
In Marc Harshman’s prize-winning collection, actual war, age, and disaster mingle with dream and hallucinatory sadness to produce an edgy sweetness few American poets have managed to give us. The voices of the lost, and found, are strangely like our own, and the stories they tell, or imply, are familiar without ever seeming the least bit stale or contrived. For all the sadness in their subject matter, the poems are deeply humane, affectionate, restorative, and brilliantly told. The work is a unique treasure.
Lynx House Press
Recognition
“As is true when David Guterson enriches our lives and literature with memorable stories and essays, he is on these pages a poet acutely, even achingly, aware of the beauty and sometimes absurdity of the natural and unnatural forms that surround us. He is awake to the experience of illusion and impermanence, loneliness and suffering. And always in these well-crafted works, where language performs at its highest level, he is awake to the possibilities of love, gratitude, redemption, and the importance of self-acceptance. With each elegant poem in Songs For A Summons, Guterson liberates our seeing, our senses, and beckons us to live more fully, more authentically, more deeply.”–Charles Johnson, author of Middle Passage
“Acclaimed Bainbridge Island author and winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award, Guterson gathers inspiration from the Pacific Northwest landscape to produce his first book of poetry.”–Seattle Times