Description

Barrow Street 2008 Prize Winner

Open Black Leapt In to any poem for the thrill of finding a poet of eerie energy breaking new ground. These pages are full of unexpected images, passionate energy, and entirely new ways of making the homely, heartbreaking world as beautiful and odd as it deserves to be. The lines and their grief-stricken cadences invent a new music for the American experience. “Improbable: our toes and shoes, the tongues and laces …” of “Fourth Grade Science.” “That billowy thing in flames back there?/That’s not my circus tent. Never seen it.” I have been reading Chris Forhan’s poetry with pleasure for many years, but this new book kept me up late with its tricks and terrors as no recent collection has, thank God, for a long, long time.
—Laura Kasischke