{"product_id":"woessner-warren-exit-sky","title":"Woessner, Warren: Exit-Sky","description":"\u003cp\u003eHoly Cow Press, paperback\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublication Date: August 20, 2019\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePublisher Marketing: Exit-Sky is a 50-poem poetry collection, the first to be published by Warren Woessner in a decade. While living an extraordinarily unique life as lawyer, scientist, and poet, Woessner has created an effecting style based on understatement and influences from Chinese poets like Han Shan and Li Po. These short poems may appear understated on the surface, but they are meditations that open up whole worlds via keen observations of the natural world and people. \"Prairie Grass\" Almost touching the snow banks, the thin stalks are bent down like old women, walking home from a country market, empty early. They are holding just a handful of seeds-- shopping baskets full of wind.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"There's much to admire in the sparse, intelligent energy of this new collection by Woessner, who has long been one of my favorite poets. You may detect echoes of Snyder, Bly, and Thoreau in the appreciative awareness of the natural world demonstrated by many of these poems. But Woessner's voice is very much his own. I love its accessible depth. Read aloud, for example, \"Another Forest\" and you'll see what I mean.\" --Joseph Bruchac\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"Warren Woessner's laconic poems, packed with silences, possess so much power in their observations of the natural world, one begins to feel beneath their surfaces, something beginning to move.\"--Justen Ahren, Martha's Vineyard Poet Laureate and author of\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cem\u003eA Machine For Remembering\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"Warren Woessner's poems are models of lyric compression. His is an animistic world where crows 'are like words \/ in search of a poem \/ no one wants to write' and summer storms 'chase each other \/ like huge black cats.' There is something of Han Shan in his taste for the elemental and something of Merwin and Bly in his ability to enter the deeper strata of our ancestral experience of nature. But look closely -- beneath the surface simplicity and timelessness is a complex modern sensibility. When Woessner goes long, as in the amazing 'Diamonds Are Forever, ' you know he has a story worth telling and hearing.\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cem\u003eExit-Sky\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003eis clear, honest work.\"--Thomas R. Smith, author of\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Glory\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"In\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cem\u003eExit-Sky\u003c\/em\u003e, Warren Woessner's poems list, narrate, and particularize universal experiences, including loss, beauty, and aging. Birds, often the harbingers of change, fly through these poems of changing light, seasons (personal and natural), losses, and realizations. Tipped over canoes' hulls point 'like compass needles\/ point at true loss.' In the book's second section, losses are named and honored. Throughout the book, Woessner's poems use energetic juxtapositions, stunning and surprising imagery ( a Barred Owl 'sits tight like a fat banker' ), and sonic events like bird songs ('witchity-witchity, ' 'chew, chew, chew'), and the 'the artillery of air conditioners.' Woessner writes a world that is always getting ready to \"start over again and again,\" a world his engaging poems alert the reader to pay attention to: 'You see it now, don't you?\/ You've got to, it's right there!'\"--Susan Firer, author of\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Transit of Venus\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"Warren Woessner's poetry offers the kind of respite we long for on long winter nights, in the fiercest weather, or in the cradle of deep loss. He sees the beauty of the ordinary sky or bird or ruffle of water and lifts it into its rightful place, radiating beauty in smallness and giving the reader a moment to pause and examine the time we have all spent on earth without being awake enough to miss what is already disappearing. These are not celebrations of mourning, rather Woessner gives us the context to examine our lives, to measure ourselves in the vanishing world. He is at the height of his poetic powers here, and we need to share this book with friends and loved ones--it's that good.\"-- Jonis Agee, author of\u003cspan\u003e \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Bones of Paradise\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":40817226219543,"sku":"9781513645605","price":16.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0004\/6497\/7956\/files\/51U_lFCIWIL._AC_UF1000_1000_QL80.jpg?v=1767826911","url":"https:\/\/open-books-a-poem-emporium.myshopify.com\/products\/woessner-warren-exit-sky","provider":"Open Books: A Poem Emporium","version":"1.0","type":"link"}