A Rising & Other Poems - Deerbrook Editions

David Sloan's second poetry collection A Rising & Other Poems is praised by Patricia Smith & Gray Jacobik

Years ago, I predicted that David Sloan’s name would easily join those who revel in the stubbornly elusive meld of craft and lyric. Ever since I’ve known him, he’s mastered it with enviable ease, in deftly-spun poems probing what consoles and disquiets us—inexplicable loss, love that illuminates, the quirks and quandaries of the natural world. This is the book that will do it. —Patricia Smith, author of Incendiary Art , winner of the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and Blood Dazzler , a National Book Award finalist

David Sloan, a man in love with words, doesn’t use them as surrogates for experience. Encountering his poems may compel you to go forth and venerate existence for its beauty and loss, eternal truth and frailty, equanimity and struggle to become. A Rising emerges from an elaborate scaffolding, its phonemes exquisitely aligned and functioning. —Mark Melnicove, author of Ghosts

David Sloan’s second collection of poems astonishes and delights at every turn, literally as each line breaks upon a next elegant phrase, apt image or surprising metaphor. There are several ekphrastic poems that are among the best I’ve ever read, a sestina that definitely is, a supple and indelible ghazal. The scope of subject matter is breathtaking: birth, childhood, grief, marriage, relationships of all ilks, including one’s relationship to Nature, and many more. A few poems are hilariously funny, others beautifully dark and sobering. More are praise songs, and every mood and tone of voice is artfully encoded. Abundance enough, but here as well, a consistent richness of texture, of the intricate workings of sound and thought that only happen when someone falls madly in love with, and remains under the spell of, language itself. This collection demonstrates, full-bore, Sloan’s accomplishment: a true poet expressing with elegant restraint and consummate skill the agony and the ecstasy of human existence in North America at this time in history. —Gray Jacobik, author of The Banquet: New and Selected Poems, and Eleanor