Starting Again by Brian Satrom

“We need poets like Brian Satrom … to lay bare our deepest longings and nameless searches.”
–PAMELA CARTER JOERN

“Brian Satrom’s Starting Again captures perfectly the ‘supreme importance of the nameless spectacle’ that William Carlos Williams aimed for in his poems. At times, Satrom locates this ‘spectacle’ in a momentary evanescence such as the one in ‘Out of Nowhere,’ about an encounter with a bat in a grocery store. ‘It’s here / and gone,’ he writes, and yet ‘something of its presence’ remains ‘like the echo of a shout…’ that comes ‘out of nowhere and goes unanswered.’ Marianne Moore believed deep ‘feeling always shows itself in silence; not silence, but restraint,’ and it is exactly this tension between silence and restraint that guides the marvelous and mature reticence of Satrom’s wonderful Starting Again.”
–MICHAEL COLLIER, author of National Book Critics Circle Award finalist The Ledge and editor of The New American Poets: A Bread Loaf Anthology

“Brian Satrom’s poems are an invitation to start again, to see the ordinary as revelatory. Tender, wise, and beautiful, these lines draw us into a consideration of patterns, the place of identity and mystery. Satrom writes, ‘and, for that matter, I’m not what I expected,’ and something in me sighs with recognition and relief. We need poets like Brian Satrom, who retain the capacity for surprise. I read these poems with gratitude, impressed both with the words and the silences.”
–PAMELA CARTER JOERN, playwright and author of fiction including In Reach and The Floor of the Sky

“The poems in Brian Satrom’s Starting Again instruct us in the demanding business of living in the world. He says, ‘I’ve refined the trick / of not answering right away, letting / the questioner imagine, fill in the blanks,’ and these poems elicit from us the same intensified attention of which we are only occasionally capable.”
–DAVID R. SLAVITT, author of The Octaves, Dwindling, and many other works of fiction, poetry, and translation