Lost Songs & Last Chances: Poems

by Chris Ransick

Overview

This collection pulses with surprising turns and playful language. The complex weave of individual, highly readable pieces presents an invitation to the reader to absorb the book as greater than the sum of its parts. Personal and intimate, the words reach out and evoke the constraints of modern life soaring above them to reveal fissures of experience and perception where mysteries and wonder exist which may be considered, at a glance, merely ordinary.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781942280200
Publisher:	Bower House
Publication date:	04/14/2015
Pages:	132
Product dimensions:	5.70(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Chris Ransick is a former poet laureate of Denver. He is the author of Asleep Beneath the Hill of Dreams, Language For the Living and the Dead, Never Summer: Poems from Thin Air, and A Return to Emptiness. He lives in Englewood, Colorado.

Table of Contents

Bread & Anger: A Prayer 1

Tom Ferril's Mandolin 3

Suite for Lost Friends 4

Sleeping in the Dead Boy's Room 12

Custodian's Night Song 13

Suite for an American Boyhood 14

High Mountain Disc Golf 24

I'd Like to Come 25

Mountains & Plains Suite 26

Poem For Your Shoes 36

This Evening of War 37

Black Canyon Suite 39

Lunch with Creeley 43

Elvis Comes Back 45

Motorcycle Suite 47

Observatory Park, Denver 50

Elegy for Rosa 51

Seacoast Suite 53

I Will Not Argue with the Cucumber Plant 61

The Defenseman's Lament 62

Highway Suite 64

How I Swam to the Bottom of the Ocean 74

Regarding the Budget Cues: A Pound Poem 76

Suite of Seasons 78

The Arc of War 88

Curfew 89

City Suite 90

Ghazal for a Murdered Poet 100

Coming Down the Mountain 101

Albion Suite 102

Editorial Reviews

"[Chris Ransick] sees the perfect — and often heart-breaking — detail in the worlds his characters inhabit. In ordinary lives he views profound humanity and our deeply shared need to matter — to ourselves, to those we care about, to the great mystery of which we’re a part."  —Russell Martin, author, Beethoven’s Hair

"I admire the unwavering imaginative persistence of this writer in his . . . fantastic story; pure, unironized narrative is one of the most endangered of poetic species now; this poem stays true to its mystery, with verve and dignity. Bravo."  —Tony Hoagland, poet, What Narcissism Means to Me

"Following Richard Hugo as much as John Wesley Powell, Chris Ransick is an exacting cartographer of the West's vast landscapes, physical and emotional, rendering them with such care you will agree with him, 'This is where / you have always lived, no matter what they say'." Jake Adam York, poet, A Murmuration of Starlings

From the Publisher