Endorsed by Kerrin McCadden
What is this Calendar that does not contain time—that instead explodes it? In Dawn Potter’s Calendar, there is an ordering of months but, inside each, a stunning variety of content, scale, and craft. This is a poet for whom language is music, for whom form is invention. These poems by turns reach toward centuries-old source texts and myths, then spring out of daily observation, meditating on how we matter in a world “that does not know you live in it,” but also on acts as quotidian as doing laundry, as caulking the shower. Disarming and profound, but also wryly, affectionately, even wearily funny, Potter’s speaker is vast—as much a Greek chorus as a next-door neighbor, asking not for a cup of sugar, but rather “Help me figure out how to be human.” What a deeply beautiful book this is—and what a reckoning. “I cannot cure my small life,” Potter’s speaker claims—yet these are poems not afraid to try.
—Kerrin McCadden
Endorsed by Arielle Greenberg
Dawn Potter’s Calendar witnesses both the partially eclipsed diurnal (laundry, litter) and the shining counter-quotidian (patience, psalms). Filled with the exquisitely observed flotsam and glory that coat our mortal coils, it’s a collection of plaintive but unsentimental musings, some in dazzling personae. The voice is a high-low mix—the moon “climb’st” while also requesting a hundred bucks through Venmo—that’s also word-thick, with gorgeous echoes of Plath and Celan. Potter’s big-hearted poems “want you to be there and . . . want you to be glad [she] came” and, gosh, I sure am.
—Arielle Greenberg
Dawn Potter is the author or editor of ten books of prose and poetry. Her poems and essays have appeared in the Beloit Poetry Journal, the Sewanee Review, the Threepenny Review, the Times Literary Supplement, and many other journals. Dawn directs poetry and teaching programs at Monson Arts and lives in Portland, Maine.
Endorsed by Megan Grumbling
Carl Little’s Blanket of the Night bestows tender attention to myriad little miracles of daily life, nature, art, and community. With a voice fluent in meditation, Little limns redemption among returnable wine bottles, the avian musicology of a flicker, the spiritual euphoria of eating a grapefruit. With empathy and wide-ranging curiosity, he recalls a hiker’s Vietnam trauma, a mother’s love of M*A*S*H, a Maine humpback whale known as Spinnaker. Little’s poetics are rich in music, allusion, and humor, and he is a master of final lines that open their poems wider yet to the world. Generous on the page as he is in his Maine community, Little is fluent in noticing and reverence. These poems beautifully honor, again and again, our own unlikely and endlessly interesting redemptions.
—Megan Grumbling, author of Booker’s Point and Persephone in the Late Anthropocene
Endorsed by Kristen Lindquist
Carl Little’s Blanket of the Night is a gorgeous quilt pieced together with such everyday blessings as green snakes, roadside mattresses, pepperidge trees, manicotti, and a sign language interpreter, alongside a celebration of family, (mostly) Maine works of art (as befits this award-winning art writer), and the town of Ellsworth, Maine. Pull this poetic quilt around you and feel its warmth as you admire its carefully crafted beauty. And its delight. Little is playful with both language and theme: who else would think to depict a 2009 Volvo as a reincarnation of his mother? Or make a poem out of clickbait? You will carry with you for a long time the many resonant images in this collection—“zones of peeper,” a zombie shopping cart, a child’s litany of “why”—along with a smile on your face.
—Kristen Lindquist, author of Tourists in the Known World and Island
Endorsed by Gibson Fay-LeBlanc
In Blanket of the Night, Carl Little provides a field guide to the flora and fauna of his corner of Maine, as well as to his family memories and their emotional territory and to the poets and artists he loves, to the town of Ellsworth, Maine, and so much else. Little’s odes and elegies include the town redemption center, a humpback beached on MDI, hitchhikers in the 1970s, a favorite pond weed, and his brother playing the piano. He places us, again and again, at a particular moment in time in the wide universe, asking us to look and take note of the minute particulars. In the title poem, which references a painting by Abby Shahn, he writes, “Pull night / over your shoulders, tuck / corners around your knees, / sleep deeply among folds / of galaxies.”
—Gibson Fay-LeBlanc, author of Death of a Ventriloquist and Deke Dangle Dive
Carl Little is the author of numerous art books and a previous collection of poetry Ocean Drinker, New & Selected Poems
