review coming soon
name
title
★★★★★ 5/5
review coming soon
name
title
★★★★★ 5/5
About James
James Grabill’s writing appears online at Calibanonline, Unlikely
Stories, Terrainonline, The Decadent Review, The Vital Sparks, Otoliths, and others. Since the early 1970s, his work has appeared in periodicals such as the East West Journal (US), Toronto Quarterly (CAN), Harvard Review (US), Greenfield Review (US), Willow Springs (US), Seneca Review (US), Caliban (US), kayak (US), Phantom Drift (US), Stand (UK), Poetry Northwest (US), Oxonian Review (UK), Magma (UK), Plumwood Mountain (AUS), Common Review (US), Momentum (US), Urthona (UK), The Buddhist Poetry Review (US), Shenandoah (US), Chariton Review (US), Laurel Review (US), North American Review (US), Verse Daily (US), and Weber: The Contemporary West (US), as well as many others. He received a B.F.A. in creative writing in 1974 from Bowling Green State University the first year it was offered and an M.F.A. in creative writing from Colorado State University in 1988, again the first year it was possible there. For a number of years, he taught writing and literature including the Shakespeare sequence for two years. He team-taught in the Clackamas Accelerated Degree Program (for folks at least seven years out from high school and employed full-time, often with children) and helped develop a year-long sequence in which he taught systems thinking and global issues relative to sustainability.
About the book
Stray Dogs and Irreversible Cars consists of lyric poems that explore our connections with conditions and ecosystems that allow us to evolve. In the manner of “deep image” poets, Grabill evokes presence of elemental forces, self-organizing cells, animals and plants that provide necessary functions in intact ecosystems, and counter-constructive human assumptions that cause harm (i.e., climate disruption or the Sixth Mass Extinction). In passages linking factors through circulation, ecosystem services, or outmoded beliefs about nature, the longer poems enable us to “dive into the living soup of eons, where we can share in the physicality of all life” (Lawrence Smith, editor of Caliban, on Grabill’s work). The poems turn on a nexus of vivid imagery reminiscent of modern paintings, but paintings that refuse to stay framed. The rhythms and sounds call to mind contemporary string quartets, if rather than instruments, there are four modes of perspective. As Smith notes, Grabill’s lyricism “surrounds us with a massive resonance” that “lifts us up into the great holy of totality.” In a way, Grabill calls for a new definition of human that includes the entire project of evolving cells.
The details
Written by James Grabill, and published by Atmosphere Press, Stray Dogs & Irreversible Cars will be available on Amazon.com fall of 2024
What readers say