Sun & Urn
Poems
Title Details
Trim size: 5.500in x 8.500in
Formats
Paperback
Pub Date: 02/15/2017
ISBN: 9-780-8203-5049-3
List Price: $19.95
Subsidies and Partnerships
Published with the generous support of Bruce and Georgia McEver Fund for the Arts and EnvRelated Subjects
Sun & Urn
Poems
Poetry that pushes beyond the tragedies of loss to the wilder realms of renewal and meaning
Skip to
- Description
- Reviews
Christopher Salerno's fourth collection of poems, Sun & Urn, is a book made from the wild stuff of grief and loss. Readers will find in these lyric poems a peculiar force pushing beyond the obvious. Sad, tender, whimsical, this book mines the poet's personal journey through grief for a universal look at how we as human beings handle our greatest losses. Coursing through this work is the clarity of vulnerability. With an idiosyncratic and inquisitive lyricism, Sun & Urn examines, repositions, and makes art from the odd scraps left over after a father's sudden death, from infertility and divorce, and from the hope of new love.
If a poet ends a poem early in a book with, 'And always a hellhound be,' I keep reading. If, several poems later, a speaker is burning his deceased father's toupee in the yard, I keep reading-harder, closer. Christopher Salerno's Sun & Urn is a highly accomplished (he has learned his trade!), a madly imaginative, and, ultimately, a brilliant and deeply human book. Read it, please, thrice!
—Tom Lux
In his haunting fourth collection, Salerno weaves a morbid kind of melancholia into the mundane and negotiates the experience of loss and a lack of fulfillment.The poems disquietingly hum with questions of what to do after death-whether one's own or another's. For whatever simple answers the poet seems to have for great unspoken questions-'There are ways to say die/ without a findable body'-Salerno wields just as many queries, yielding a book ripe with eerie and meaning-filled unknowing.
—Publisher’s Weekly (starred review)
