Words for a Lost Year

Arranged in four sections named for the seasons, these poems trace a relationship through the arc of a symbolic year, exploring desire and place and identity. Insofar as they express a speaker's state of mind, these are lyric poems. The author says: "These carnivorous lyrics, backhand love poems, and sorta sonnets embody the gut-punch poetic."

"Spinoza and Springsteen walk into a bar . . . and the result is Murray Shugars' WORDS FOR A LOST YEAR, helmed by philosophy and fueled by desire. The voice in these poems comes at you with the bruised romanticism of the lyric and the full-throated keening of a rock song. The weather is what holds them together, but if you put your ear to the page you can hear the howling heart that just might blow them apart." --Johanna Sutherland

"Secret, shuddering, blithe, Murray Shugars' poems impart that quality of the heart that Lorca called duende. I say impart because their art, which is subtle and investigative, seems to channel deep image, deep song, the big-B Beat in Kerouac's original sense of beatitude. Here is battlefield, Stanford's. Here is craft as what it is, ritual. In Shugars' WORDS FOR A LOST YEAR, writing is the rite of seasons, but this is no simple or unearned pastoral meditation. These poems ruminate with the year--on art, on each other, on love, on distances, on the deep time that weighs like weather. These are poems that return, poems to return to, because here are seasons of the heart."--Matthew Salyer

"In Murray Shugars' third collection, WORDS FOR A LOST YEAR, poems function as meaningful artifacts and assorted treasures that are revelatory and lyrical, conjuring memories and quotidian moments held beneath a powerful lens of honest reflection, with glimpses of 'sunstruck snowflakes, ' 'a discarded flake of sky, ' and 'Night's white asterisks.' The poems here--whether in Muskegon, Vicksburg, or Mosul--offer clarity, discoveries, and beautiful truths like days remembered in any given year." --Gina Ferrara, Amiss

Poetry.