Questions About Circulation

by Charles Malone, Jerrod Schwarz (Editor), Erica Dawson (Selected by)

Overview

Charles Malone's Questions About Circulation is a tender, powerful mediation on the geographies that define us, asking poignant questions about the environments we leave behind.

In this powerful short collection, Charles Malone investigates the concepts of forgotten landscapes. What does it mean to leave a place? What does it mean to return? These subtle but striking poems probe the experience of leaving a place that might no longer define you.

Questions About Circulation is filled with stunning poetry that revels in lush, natural imagery. Malone crafts fully-realized, three-dimensional worlds in his poems that stick with you longer after you have finished reading.

This collection also asks poignant questions about the differences between rural and urban life, peeling away the rigidity that often separates these two geographies.

Readers looking for poems about place and its ever-shifting role in how we identify ourselves will fall in love with Questions About Circulation.

This collection also features a bespoke interview with the writer at then end of the book, delving deeper into the craft, influences, and life behind their work.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781949065039
Publisher:	Driftwood Press
Publication date:	03/26/2019
Pages:	48
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.10(d)

About the Author

Charles Malone grew up in rural Northeastern Ohio, headed west to the Rockies, came back to the Great Lakes, and has loved all of it. Charles now works at the Wick Poetry Center at Kent State University coordinating community outreach programs. He edited the collection "A Poetic Inventory of Rocky Mountain National Park" with Wolverine Farm Publishing and has work recently published or forthcoming in Hotel Amerika, The Best of Boneshaker: A Bicycling Almanac, Saltfront, The Sugar House Review, and The Gordon Square Review. He lives in one of the most nurturing small towns for poets, Kent, Ohio.

Erica is the author of three books of poetry: When Rap Spoke Straight to God (Tin House, 2018), winner of the 2018 Florida Book Awards Gold Medal for Poetry; The Small Blades Hurt (Measure Press, 2014), winner of the 2016 Poets' Prize; and, Big-Eyed Afraid (Waywiser Press, 2007), winner of the 2006 Anthony Hecht Prize. Her poems have appeared in Blackbird, Revel, The Believer, Virginia Quarterly Review, and other journals. Her poems have appeared in several anthologies, including Best American Poetry 2008, 2012, and 2015, Resistance, Rebellion, Life: 50 Poets Now, and American Society: What Poets See. Her prose has appeared in The Rumpus. She has been featured on PBS Newshour, and in The New York Times Magazine, and O, The Oprah Magazine.

Editorial Reviews

"How to extract “wonder from sediment,” especially if the sediment is vaguely toxic? This is the central question of Charlie Malone’s Questions About Circulation. One answer is to dig––the literal trace of land use, the lateral spread of material history, the billowing field of childhood memory. These poems brim with glacial moraine, crumbling mills, wild blackberry thickets, and “a big peaceful cement pond [reflecting] tarnished copper.” But it is aftermath that concerns the present, and these poems haunt the body’s arterial connections: “a vein is a way elsewhere, and part of a circuit.” Tracing our entanglements, Charlie Malone’s Questions About Circulation returns us to the ground of our senses: “and slow down/put the o in close the boy has flown.”"

-Matthew Cooperman, author of Spool

"Questions About Circulation is vivid and visceral and palpable. All the perks of James Wright and Wendell Berry, and lyricism all his own. The work is somehow softly abrasive."

-Erica Dawson, author of When Rap Spoke Straight to God

From the Publisher