80 pages / 6.00 x 9.00 inches / no illustrations
“Dying never / ends for us. It only slowly rearranges us,” writes Steve Scafidi in his poignant new collection. Inspired by his own work as a cabinetmaker—defined by the peppery dust from the woodworker planing a walnut board, turning an oak spindle at the lathe, or honing chisels while gazing out a window—Scafidi’s poems reveal both the tenuous and the everlasting nature of existence.
Steve Scafidi, author of Sparks from a Nine-Pound Hammer, For Love of Common Words, and To the Bramble and the Briar, works as a cabinetmaker and lives in Summit Point, West Virginia.
“Scafidi deftly confronts both death and disaster in a manner that is as hilarious as it is serious. . . . In Scafidi’s universe, it’s all right to be a little off-center, because it is in the common, in the everyday that he finds dignity and communion.”—Karla Huston, Library Journal
“This poet engages life on multiple levels—not complacent in the presence of suffering and not ignoring injustice, but open to the possibilities of grace, of beauty, of atonement.”—Philip Belcher, Southern Quarterly
“When I tell you [Scafidi] is a poet of impressive reach and Elizabethan exuberance, you may take me at my word. Imaginatively adroit, formally outfitted without necessarily being formally complex, his work inhabits a large cognitive and imagistic space where ostensible subjects—snakes and weasels, a burning truck, the spruce front of a violin—grow into emanations or strands of implication.”
—David Rigsbee, Cortland Review
“Scafidi’s poetry . . . musically and vividly reminds readers that creation is full of delights both large and small. It reminds us that life is short, that death is inevitable, and that the only mature responses to these hard facts are to be aware of beauty, meaning, pleasure, to take nothing for granted, to care deeply, and celebrate while we can. These are realizations that can quietly transform a life.”
—Jeff Mann, Appalachian Journal
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