Walking Lorton Bluff by Paul Stroble

A “mild promise of heaven”—that’s what the characters in these marvelous poems seek to understand. With people known and unknown, brave seekers whose emblems, dreams, and graves might vanish in time or in a Holocaust, these poems are history made into art. Paul Stroble connects his historical search and long-gone relatives to John Brown and Elie Wiesel, Emmett Till and Lincoln, Dr. King and Darwin, then and now. Paul Stroble has a wonderful voice like no one else writing today.

–Thomas Dukes, author of Baptist Confidential and Sugar Blood Jesus.

In his book-length poem Walking Lorton Bluff, Paul Stroble turns his attention to his own genealogy as his family history intersects American history. While his forbearers buried a beloved father, Darwin was changing science, slavery ravaged our country, and Abraham Lincoln considered the presidential office. But these are quiet poems, in the best possible sense, poems that ask us to be still and listen to our own pasts, to the grounds we walk on, to how our personal and political histories continue to shape our lives. “Where is God/ in the far country/ of our muddy boots?” Stroble writes. And, “I choose flowers/ for your unknown grave.” This is a lovely, politically engaged, and personally rich poetry book that asks us to remember our pasts as we continue to forge our futures.

–Andrea Scarpino, author of What the Willow Said As It Fell and Once Upon Wing Lake