No Rake Required

Look what landed in my office yesterday! Check out the hand-stitching, folks. Gorgeous! Congratulations again, Justin.

This is the perfect chapbook to read on a drizzly autumn morning, especially if you're a little crabby and avoiding the piles of work on your desk. Gathering up the Scattered Leaves is interweaved with lyric meditations on the turning seasons, the impulse to return home, and the speaker's relation to and place within nature. The chapbook is grounded by place, and illuminated with the reverberations of images we can all witness, such as seen in the stanza below, from "Driving Across the Salt Flats While Listening to Homer's Odyssey."

Slowly, the moon sheds its onion skin
becomes a worn silver dollar
as it slides parallel, hovers
over the basin of this ancient lake:
silver light reflecting salt,
salt reflecting back.

After reading these poems, I'm suddenly much calmer, and the piles of papers on my desk seem shorter. Maybe they aren't folders, but mountains, surrounding the cool lake of this screen.