Free-Fall by Dana Yost

‘’Here is a book for our times.  Yost’s vivid, grounded images and candid advice speak to a generation increasingly disconnected from place and history, and therefore increasingly distressed about their lives.’’

–David R. Pichaske, Editor-Publisher of Spoon River Poetry Press

In Free-Fall, Dana Yost works at keeping a difficult balance in the midst of loneliness, loss, and the angers and fears of contemporary life. He does not minimize the starkness of depression and mental health challenges, but for ballast, he holds on to the smell of lavender, a scrap of blue flannel shirt snagged in a red maple, a “sickle-shaped moon . . . hung in the sky /  like a tool on a workshop wall.” Set in small towns on the prairie, his poems find a solidity as real as the stone that slips soundlessly into the river, “the strength in the mercy and forgiveness of the meek.”
–Susan McLean, author of The Best Disguise and The Whetstone Misses the Knife

Edgy, unsettled, reckoning with those old ghosts—what was, what might have been, and the sickle moon hanging over us all—the poems in Dana Yost’s Free-Fall might wake you in the night, might, in the best ways, haunt your days.

–Joe Wilkins, author of When We Were Birds and Thieve