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Praise
for
Short Houses With Wide Porches
“The
poems of Christopher Watkins are, at once, tender, shrewdly
observed and enormously vital. This is a first collection
that has the stamp of authenticity, of life fully lived and
fully written.”
-Baron
Wormser (former Poet Laureate of Maine, a Guggenheim Grant
receipient, and the author of many award-winning collections
of poetry, including his New & Selected due from Sarabande
Books in May of 2008)
“In
the poems of this debut collection, Christopher Watkins carries
on the tradition of the man in whose house many of them were
written, stalking the moment and playing it out like a musician
on three vintage typewriters, always attuned to the clear
vibration that sounds unmistakably when craft accompanies
spontaneity. Here are poems both tender and wild, ‘moist as
rotting leaves,/ dank as garbage,/ ripe with life.’”
-Jeffrey
Harrison (author of four full-length books of poetry, including
The Singing Underneath, selected by James Merrill for the
National Poetry Series, recipient of fellowships from the
John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National
Endowment for the Arts, as well as two Pushcart Prizes, the
Amy Lowell Traveling Poetry Scholarship, and the Lavan Younger
Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets.)
“Send
a blues traveler down to live in Jack Kerouac’s house in Florida,
let him compose on his ’28 Underwood and tack dithyrambic
hymns to the wall while Monk and Parker hold court, invite
Bessie Smith, Han-Shan, and William Matthews in at the end
of the day, imagine discourse-sparks and music-flares rising
into the tinderbox night, and then imagine that those mad
laments and ecstatic songs are coming from one voice, and
that voice is talking to you quietly and thoughtfully, and
all that superabundant life has been channeled into the fine
excess of his music. The poems of Christopher Watkins are
astonishing.”
-Ted
Deppe (author of three books of poetry, Children of the
Air (Alice James Books), The Wanderer King (Alice James) and
Cape Clear: New and Selected Poems (Salmon Books, Ireland).
His work has appeared in many journals, including Harper's
Magazine, Poetry, The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review,
Poetry Ireland Review, and Ploughshares. Ted has received
a Pushcart Prize and two fellowships from the National Endowment
for the Arts. He has served as writer-in-residence at the
James Merrill House in Stonington, CT, the Poets House in
Donegal, Ireland, and Phillips Academy in Andover, MA.)
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