By Kurt Luchs
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.
Notices
“Accessible, strange and yet strangely familiar, Kurt Luchs’ poems movingly address the huge, perennial questions we mortals have wrestled with since the dawn of human time: How the hell did we get here—and where is ‘here,’ after all? Not to mention death and the ultimate darkness at the end of time. Amazingly, the voice of these poems is full of grace, humor, and moments of transcendent imagination: ‘I long to fall forever/ between stars, into the dark/ like a hole someone is still digging; /to burrow in the drifts of snow like silence;/ to be the shadow that walks away when a man dies…’ Death Row Row Row Your Boat is a scintillating, startling—and very funny—pleasure, full of unexpected turns of phrase and wonder. I hope it finds the wide audience it deserves.”
—Michael Hettich, author of The Halo of Bees: New and Selected Poems, 1990-2022
Kurt Luchs was born in Cheektowaga, New York, grew up in Wheaton, Illinois, and has lived and worked all over the United States, mostly in publishing and media. Currently he’s based in Kalamazoo, Michigan. His first poetry publication came at age 16 in the long-gone journal Epos, right next to a poem by Bukowski. He wrote comedy for television (Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher and the Late Late Show with Craig Kilborn) and radio (American Comedy Network), and contributed humor to the New Yorker, the Onion and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, among others. His poetry chapbooks include One of These Things Is Not Like the Other (Finishing Line Press 2019), and The Sound of One Hand Slapping (SurVision Press 2022). He won a 2022 Pushcart Prize, a 2021 James Tate Poetry Prize, the 2021 Eyelands Book Award for Short Stories, and the 2019 Atlanta Review International Poetry Contest. He is a Contributing Editor of Exacting Clam, the literary journal from Sagging Meniscus. More at kurtluchs.com and on Facebook.