How to Draw Fire

In How to Draw Fire Marcus Whalbring includes four sections that move from childhood, to reflections of estrangement, to love and parenthood, and ends in a place of healing and affirmation. This collection appeals to lovers of different schools of poetry. Those who admire the confessional mode will be attracted to the vulnerability in poems that explore the sense of anxiety and loss as the poet explores the strained relationships with family members and writes of the dynamics of love and marriage and parenthood. Those who love surrealism and magical realism, will enjoy poems of whimsy that include a strange trip into an entire existence within a box and a poem about highlighter brought to a cemetery. In Marcus Whalbring's second collection of poems, he attempts to find common humanity and vulnerability by finding the threads that stitch together the memory and the dream, the world of childhood and the world of adulthood, the momentous and the everyday.