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

These poems have in them something of Theodore Roethke’s excitement at being alive in the physical world—how much there is to see!—as well as Roethke’s certainty of the darkness threaded all through that world. Yet they remain wholly Chris Forhan’s poems—brooding and exuberant, tender and amazed. “The heart gets sad, you slap it,” he writes. Fiercely observant, richly inventive, and sometimes very funny, Black Leapt In is a terrific book.
—Lawrence Raab

Barrow Street Press is pleased to announce Chris Forhan’s book Black Leapt In has been named a finalist in the 2010 Indiana State Book Competition. Congratulations to Chris! Click here for details.

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ISBN: 9780981987606