Honest James

Author: Christian Schlegel

Publisher: The Song Cave (2015)

With setting moons, talking tulips, and the peacefulness found in a horse’s mane, the poems in Christian Schlegel’s debut collection Honest James might be as difficult to describe as the layered notes of an ancient perfume. “A famous notion twirled and froze. I made it mine. / Again it twirled.” This unabashedly lyrical collection, which never shies away from rhyme, includes various cameos, including Goethe in its second section, with the end result being what John Ashbery calls “one of the strangest books of poetry to come along in some time.”