Stallings, Andy: Paradise

Paradise by Andy Stallings (Rescue Press, paperback)

Publication Date: April 15, 2018

Publisher Marketing: Poetry. As a bird learns to sing first by listening, Andy Stallings's PARADISE is attuned and attentive to surrounding song. Stallings's second collection's interests are as various as the paradises that scaffold a life: paradises lost in memory's mutable echo or fleetingly glimpsed in "the depth of a living tree," in children squabbling or sketching colorful "scribulations," in "such gloss, and sway, and / transparent grace as paradise / deftly affords." Of course, "The value of tolerance for / paradise varies depending on / the tolerance, the paradise," and Stallings awes at some versions while working to dismantle others. The praise that emerges in this careful awareness is tender, grave, and full of delight. In PARADISE, the inherent dignity of each thing—animal, vegetable, familial, ethereal—pulses into profound focus: "Nothing in / the universe is delicate / at scale." "The stem of a flower should / not suffice to hold up / the weight of the blossom. / And yet."

"PARADISE is a work of radical reception. With unflinching attention and deep compassion, Stallings charts experiences of place, family, memory, identity, and, always, relation, weaving these moments into a shifting, breathing text: 'Your / shadow constant on / the boxcars moving past, / say reflection and river, say / body and strangers' eyes.' If we simultaneously make and are made by the world, Stallings maps this morphing territory with exquisite nuance, moving steadfastly toward complexity and a generative bewilderment, 'a map that leaves us astray in unmarked woods.' Stallings's PARADISE traces the intricacies of both thought and perception, what we desire and what we receive, what we create and what we stumble upon; Paradise, interrogated; 'a soft, deniable animal.'"—Laura Walker