WHAT ARE YOU READING?
From a boy’s first acquaintance with nature and the meaning of time to witnessing climate change and desolating wars, Theodore Haddin’s poems in The Pendulum Moves Off celebrate the lives of humans and Earth’s other animal inhabitants with longing, exuberance, and awakening. Time is in the clock as well as in nature, and our extraction of the natural world diminishes us as well. In truth, “tock and tick” are not forever, but the call of art and music and Haddin’s love of rivers in this beautiful and thought-provoking collection remind us of a better way of life we have yet to discover.
Will be released January 16, 2024. Amid the tensions of family and community and the struggles with desire and disappointment out of which art is made, there is all this profusion: an unstoppable spring, the orange flash of a fox, figs and honey in a Greek harbor town, and a pianist conjuring lost love in his figured solos—our ravenous lives teetering on the edge of today’s sadness. In his ninth poetry collection, The Book of Failures, Neil Shepard wanders urban and rural landscapes, from American coastlines to foreign shores, the sudden signposts deciphering what’s won, what’s lost. Though the tone is often elegiac in this prismatic book of human strivings, it is woven with wit and wisdom enough to illuminate the night sky and bring unexpected levity to his many discoveries. Will be released January 16, 2024.
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WELL READ MAGAZINE
