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[featured in the bookclub Poetry Special]
The epigraph to this book, from Lucille Clifton, reads “home is burning in me.” It is clear from Tony Crunk’s quiet, powerful poems that he understands how the ties and traditions of home—in his case a rural, strongly Baptist section of Western Kentucky—can both light your way and threaten to consume you. Full of nature imagery and keen observations, his book explores that tension in five sections. Four of them are populated with mostly short, sometimes stark poems, while one, “Discursions,” takes the form of concise, dense prose. But all of the parts are equally evocative, giving us not only an intimate look into the mind of the narrator, but also detailed, vivid snapshots of the people and place that surround him. The book is both a meditation and a journey: “What we mistook for flight / was only the long struggle / to surface, and we arrive / at a place familiar as a socket.”
Blurbs from the book jacket
Card catalog entry from the Library of Congress
Publisher’s information page from Yale University Press
Amazon.com information page
Barnes and Noble information page
Sample poem: Leaving
Reviews: Avatar Review and Rambles
Poetry for Dummies, an essay by Frederica Mathewes-Green, includes an appreciation of Living in the Resurrection.
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