Aaron Anstett’s new collection has the qualities we expect from this distinctive American poet: a just imprecise enough ("exactish") sense of beauty, a polished, often comic, wit, and, just beneath the crystalline surface, deep wells of unflinching and darkly rational sorrow. New here, though, is a fragility that may also be, strangely, a kind of “late-stage” freedom: a radically fractured incompleteness, tremblingly grasping towards what can no longer be held: “It was often all we could do.”
Aaron Anstett’s previous collections are Insofar as Heretofore, Each Place the Body’s, No Accident, and Sustenance. Among other honors, his work has received the Nebraska Book Award, the Backwaters Prize, and the Balcones Poetry Prize, and he has served as a regional poet laureate, instituting a continuing program that places the work of local writers in waiting areas. He lives in Colorado with his wife, Lesley, and children.