Maine Poet Laureate’s new book of poems
How to Start Over
ISBN:978-0-9600293-4-1
6 x 9; 88 pages, $17.25
available now
Stuart Kestenbaum’s new book includes some experimental poems using source words supplied by others. The cover features art by Susan Webster entitled, The letter A.
From the back cover
KEEN AND FULL OF WISDOM, these utterly graceful poems speak to us like aphorisms or proverbs, making us pause, pay attention to the world again, and reconsider our lives—past, present, and future. Whether contemplating love or nature, politics or pop-culture, Stuart Kestenbaum questions our assumptions and gently reveals the extraordinary in the everyday, the reverent in irreverent, the logical in the absurd, the fullness of our emptiness. These poems make me feel fully present and aware: every word a deep breath; every line a moment of deep meditation.
—Richard Blanco
How to Start Over gives us a keen eye for the natural world and a gentle encouragement to wake up and look. Then Stuart Kestenbaum adds a sly humor and ironic wisdom, knowing that we will always stumble and snooze, and need to begin again. Indeed beginning again is a major theme in these poems, implying grief and breakage, but also wonder, as the broom he describes sweeps up dust, and also “the luminescent green wings of a Luna moth.” Some of these poems were made– or sparked– by lists of random words given to the poet. But really nothing is random to an imagination that can see the whole from its scattered parts, see in disparate elements a “full spectrum holiness.” These are marvelous poems, reminding us we are always “part of a longer story”; they are love poems to the world and its great mysteries, and to us who snooze and wake again among the marvels.
—Betsy Sholl
I’ve often thought I’d like to go on a world tour with Stuart Kestenbaum—he’s that smart and funny, that self-possessed and wise, quiet at the right times, ready to rage, the perfect companion on the trip that is this beautiful book. A trip inward, I mean, where towers fall and not even goddesses are timeless, no need to be checking your inbox for love, if I may quote our man. I love the music of these sentences, and the sadness, and the seriousness, the long lingering moments when a line or image or idea has stopped you cold and you realize that even as you’re seeing the world new you’re having plain fun, more fun than you’ve had in a very long time, and the laughter begins. How to Start Over is a light in the dark, a look at what we’ve been missing, and Stuart Kestenbaum is one of our fi nest poets, working still and always at the peak of his powers.”
—Bill Roorbach