Windthrow and Salvage

In Winthrow and Salvage, Randall Freisinger shifts his always engaging voice to a minor key to focus on aging and loss, on our place in the universal entropy. There is much here about human fallibility, suffering, and sorrow, always examined with insight and empathy. But there are recuperative moments as well, for instance in a small-town slow- pitch tournament with its little world "closed and precisely composed of forgiveness/ and second chances." There are also seriocomic ones, like when the Fisher King ends up at the Mayo Clinic. In the closing poem, the poet, to his wife's bemusement, breaks into a dance at breakfast, to an inner tune that has "great lyrics, a good beat/you can really dance to, better now, / if only for knowing the score." This is a book for those who know the score-and for those still learning it.

William Trowbridge, author of Vanishing Point and Put This On, Please (Red Hen Press)

As its evocative title suggests, the poems in Windthrow & Salvage name & attend to many kinds of damage & repair - physical, climatic, psychic, emotional, generational & cultural. The ampersand is a pivotal hinge here in these vignettes of loss & discovery, grief & reclamation. Both the past and present are vivid, alive, haunting. Freisinger's poems teach us how to live within "the infinite, fugitive moment." It's a specific, personal journey as well as a collective one - mythologized by such astute attention to details. These are poems of resilience, and not without some stunning moments of reflective humor along the way.

Laurie Kutchins, author of Slope of the Child Everlasting and The Night Path (BOA Editions Ltd)

Randall Freisinger's poems are witty, poignant, and lyrical, full of good stories, apt metaphor, and well-wrought sentences. Whether he writes about John Wayne movies, deaf students "shipped" to his elementary school, or finding evidence that his parents actually had sex, Freisinger's poems celebrate the trials and triumphs of being human. Windthrow & Salvage is a book that you'll be glad to own.

Charles Harper Webb, author of Sidebend World and Shadow Ball: New And Collected Poems (Pitt Poetry Series)