TAKE FIVE PROSE POEMS BY 5 POETS by Laura Baird, Deborah Brown, Barbara Siegel Carlson, Richard Jackson, & Susan Thomas

Piece by piece, this collection meets the challenge of the prose poem: to generate the tension of juxtaposition  and diffuse awareness within a small, seemingly straightforward block of text, and then make a surprising arrival. Taken together, these poems meet a larger challenge, collaborating with place (both foreign and familiar) and with philosophical ideas to question and partially illuminate dimensions beyond their ostensible boundaries: the past, the cosmos, and sometimes the anguish of distant others.  Generous, empathetic, and deftly observant, these poems leave an afterglow, each one small candle guiding us through the  forest of so much we don’t know.

–Leslie Ullman, author of Library Of Small Happiness and Progress on the Subject of Immensity

Poetry is said to be the most solitary of arts, but the best work is so often given to conversation—with other poems, with the world, with what is inexpressible.  Take Five makes that conversation a literal fact, and its ingenious design keeps rounding on itself, five voices that turn like a wheel of souls into a galaxy far larger than its individual stars and planets.  The generosity of spirit, flux of imagination, play of wit, and immediacy of feeling encountered here remind me of what one finds in reading the long sequences of Japanese renga—a sort of wisdom and surprise available only in the act of response.  Thanks to all involved for this invigorating gift.

 –David Rivard, author of Standoff and Otherwise Elsewhere

“As they contemplate the approaching end of human life on this planet, these five observant voices speak to us with quietly devastating power. This small book is really stunning!”

–Joyce Johnson, author of Minor Characters and winner of National Book Critics Circle Award