By Fowlers Fork by Chuck Stringer

Chuck Stringer’s poems sing with the music of his beloved Fowlers Fork, a suburban creek he walks each day to explore its history and its present, its rough beauty and the encroaching desecration through development and disregard. These poems document the life of the creek and its denizens: chert shards left by Fort Ancient hunters and bilious graffiti left by local teens alongside coyote, heron, “horse-fly; wolf/spider; hellbender,/American bullfrog/& American toad.” Through floods and drought, a pandemic and a racial reckoning, Stringer’s work is an ode to wildness, to constancy, to mystery, and to knowing one’s place in the world.

–Pauletta Hansel, Cincinnati Poet Laureate, Emeritus; author of Heartbreak Tree, winner of the 2022 North American Book Award, Poetry Society of Virginia.

Up and down the stream we go, season by season, following a man’s gaze into the wild, “terrible beauty” unfurling inside a suburban boundary land of ancient history, natural systems, and the here and now of each lived day. This ritual journeying folds us into a sacred puzzle, where we may “wake dreaming / of sparrows… / through the redbud and black/walnut out by Second Bridge,” or ache to interpret “dark tree meaning” in the sycamore grove, ancient artifacts, or littered banks. Like the fire-eyed coyote, we encounter scenes that leave us “lurking at the edges, waiting, watching”—and some days, we may step directly into the living current to name what is there. Toned with sensory exuberance and lyrical variety, By Fowlers Fork is an uncanny praise song, shining light on the spiritual waypoints held by small places.

–Sherry Cook Stanforth, PhD; Managing Editor, Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel; Director, Originary Arts Initiative

Beetles, trees, litter, birdsong, and ancient presences. These Chuck Stringer encounters in his daily pilgrimages along and sometimes in Fowlers Fork, a waterway just a few steps from his Northern Kentucky home. But those steps take him far—over Ordovician rocks and fossils, past a First People’s flint-working ground, into a daily immersion in the fullness of time and the wild. Walk with him in these reverent, attentive poems and be renewed.

–Richard Hague, author of  During The Recent Extinctions, Weatherford Award in Poetry.