Bücher veröffentlicht von Gold Wake Press Collective

Poetry. "There is something impossibly quixotic about this 'project' of ritualizing through the lyric poem the grand narrative of the cosmos-The Creation, rich with its improbable math, its spiritual mysteries, and its unquestionable intimations of mortality. But Nick Courtright leaps in with the reassuring gifts of musicality and deftly handled language on his side to produce a work replete with doubt, faith, science, unbelief and humility. The illumination in LET THERE BE LIGHT is not found in the answers given, but in the humanity of asking tough questions beautifully and truthfully. This is, in the end, the meaning of enlightenment, and, evidently, compelling verse."-Kwame Dawes "'Every life/has its own light' writes Nick Courtright, and the light of his dazzling poems is a continual surprise and a revelation."-Naomi Shihab Nye "Let there always be Nick Courtright, whose truly stellar new book of poems proves once and for all that beyond the event horizon and all the churning dark matter is a whole new matter, an even bigger Big Bang, a blindingly (in)human new light forever."-Matt Hart "Here are poems moving from 'the immensity of the galaxy' to 'the smallness of the human soul.' Here's Courtright, framed in the half-light of Plato's Cave, prying open Pandora's Box with Occam's Razor to pull out the dominion of Stevens' Jar. You can flip the switch as often as you like, but you can't turn off the illumination. Besides, now it's your job to tell the rest of the world what they've been missing: Get to work! God knows these poems have been there all week already."-Noah Eli Gordon

We're The Flowover. We Come From Flyoverland. introduces a roving, Baudelarian speaker seeking to "translate pigeon into English" (the bird's music, or grammatically simplified language), among the streets of "bone and ash," post-empire USA: home to "The Longest Winter on Record." Amid "mirrors not made of metal amalgam and glass," and indexical signs replacing reality ("food we want to eat via pointing"), he mourns the tendency to kill "not the enemy but the messenger," in a world where what's sacred is unprotected: a "a temple where the door is never locked." But this speaker is not dissuaded by simulacra nor the steady thrum ("wrong, goddamnit") that "grows into what I hear": instead, he tunes into a "species forgotten," a "small print none have ever bothered to read." The title delivers its promise: the flownover (disregarded) from flyoverland (transcendent) arrive at a Carpe Diem not rapacious but ecstatic, as tourists of the body, in "climax," become those of the mind. -Virginia Konchan, author of Any God Will Do and The End of SpectacleReading Mauch's work, I'm reminded over and over of Stanley Kunitz's statement that "The first task of the poet is to create the person who will write the poems." Here we have the kind of shimmering lyric insights that can come only from a mind and heart far along the path of enlightenment. What a great gift Mauch has given us by inviting us to share in the journey, offering us no less than "a temple where the door is never locked." -Melissa Studdard, author of Like a Bird with a Thousand Wings and I Ate the Cosmos for Breakfast