Extenuating Circumstances by Charles Halsted

In Charles Halsted’s poignant debut, the reader journeys from first beers to medical school, from missing a mother to the profound start of each day. Halsted writes poems of awe—for the practice of medicine, in which he made a lifelong career, and humanity, which exists alongside America’s history, with its “bombs in the night,” its inequity and rage. Extenuating Circumstances delivers a frank and powerful gift—it challenges us to connect “line and hook with millennia of evolution.”

–Lauren Hilger, poetry editor of No Tokens and author of Lady Be Good.  

Extenuating Circumstances is an autobiography in verse that carries its subject, physician Charles Halsted, from early years in New England to his eighties in northern California. While sometimes getting his shoes muddy along the way, he also reaches heights of satisfaction in making poetry of what he finds as he looks back. This lifelong series of poems is as tantalizing and as satisfying to read as it surely was inspiriting to experience. A reader senses time’s winged chariot pressing author Charles Halsted to get it all down in print on paper. And for that the reader is grateful.

–Hannah Stein, author of Earthlight (La Questa Press) and of chapbooks Schools of Flying Fish (State Street Press) and A Broken Music (Finishing Line Press).