Much

"It is no small thing, this casting," Joel Peckham writes of fishing, but it might be any action described in this book. Whether these characters and speakers are shoveling asphalt, trying and failing to pop a wheelie, or engaged in contentious flirtation, they are fully aware both of their unredeemed bodies and the horizons the spirit senses but can only aspire to. In long, sinewy lines or flowing prose poems, Peckham casts a loving but unsentimental gaze over his subjects. Here is a poet who writes with the eye of a seer, one whose lines arouse the lyric fury available only to those poets who have thoroughly mastered their craft.

Al Maginnes, Author of Sleeping Through the Graveyard Shift