magic town

Author: Larry Kearney

Publisher: Veer Books (2016)

"magic town moves through a certain (US West Coast) conception of poetry to the real that shows after you have moved through the imaginary, starts to appear. It passes through switch-backs of sense to what you/I knew before knowing it in sentences, so it's already there. So, what's at the edge of knowing? 'I love it in / the real.' And what is the real? 'broke-up light of autumn / coming. a pain which cannot / be borne / doesn't exist.' You are not likely to find that much openness to pain in much other poetry. Magic town passes through major desolation, through death-in-life, 'with nothing in spirit falling / nowhere,' but with joy and withoutsurrender, with surrender." 

—William Rowe