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How can I-or anyone-not adore David Graham's new collection? The tone throughout is hospitable, wry, and affirming even while acknowledging that loss and suffering are ever present. The honey of earth "comes and goes at once," Wallace Stevens wrote, and these poems embody that paradox in vivid detail and compelling language. The sweetness that life offers-love, art, music, family, nature-exists simultaneously with the bitterness it guarantees-pain, grief, death. Both coming and going, The Honey of Earth deftly weaves "darkness and light together" with great wisdom, humor, and compassion. -Eric Nelson
About the author
David Graham has published two full-length collections of poetry, Magic Shows and Second Wind, as well as four chapbooks, most recently Stutter Monk. He is also co-editor of After Confession: Poetry as Autobiography (with Kate Sontag) and Local News: Poetry About Small Towns (with Tom Montag). He retired in 2016 from teaching writing and literature at Ripon College, where he also hosted the Visiting Writers Series for twenty-eight years. He has served on The Poets' Prize Committee and the Wisconsin Poet Laureate Commission and was a Resident Poet and a faculty member at The Frost Place. Currently he is a contributing editor for Verse-Virtual, where he contributes a monthly column, "Poetic License," on poetry and poets. After retiring,he returned to his native upstate New York with his wife, the artist Lee Shippey.
