Gaze

(Paperback)

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FINALIST FOR THE RILKE PRIZE

Christopher Howells haunted and hauntingGazeis a collection of counterpoints, swinging between moments of delicate connection and striking brutality. Howell explores how our interior and exterior lives are entangled, the past living on inside us as we live in the physical world around us, and he reminds us how loss releases us into the presenthow in the process of living, everybody pays.

Gazeis divided into three sections, focusing successively on the objective world, the world of the inner life, and finally on the other world of the imagination and alternate reality. The author speaks through his own voice as well as the voices of other characters, ghosts, and creatures, coming together to question and explore our perception of the world. Shifting between lyric and narrative, these poems proceed incrementally and with humility, offering a bewitching and deeply felt wisdom.

Reviews

FINALIST FOR THE RILKE PRIZE "For nearly four decades Christopher Howell has so ably been marrying the miraculous to the mundane; the invisible world to the here-before-our-eyes; the wacky to the expectable; the meditative to the pratfall-prone; the immediate to the ghost-ridden; and the mirthful to the elegiac--and marrying them with authority." --Albert Goldbarth, author of Saving Lives "Gaze leads its reader through a concatenation of perspectives to a simultaneously mournful and hopeful place. It leaves us with that indescribable feeling of interconnectedness that sometimes emerges from great literature wherein the particular, deeply meditated upon, expands into the universal and makes us more than ourselves." --Ryan Siemers, Quarterly West "These are beautiful crow-lit lyric poems singed with memory, delivered in an off-hand minor chord, touched by the surreal and the small, that manages to distill loss and still deliver a fierce joy." --Mark Wagenaar, 32poems