Böcker av Chris Ransick

This collection begins in the realm of the mummer whose masked performance conceals the self and transforms language to better evoke what is too risky to speak overtly. Ransick's poems ply this tension between knowing and speaking in cadence and imagery that simultaneously disorients readers and beckons them forward, in lines whose half-remembered music refuses to be predictable. The role of the shunned figures in the title is to draw poems out from the margins of experience, to reclaim voices muted by more powerful forces, an elusive goal only the best poetry can accomplish. Travel along with them as guides, ready to steal and scavenge what you need for your own escape.

This collection pulses with surprising turns and playful language. The complex weave of individual, highly readable pieces presents an invitation to the reader to absorb the book as greater than the sum of its parts.

Chris Ransick, appointed Denver Poet Laureate in 2006, is the author of five books: Language for the Living and the Dead; Never Summer: Poems from Thin Air (Winner of the Colorado Book Award); A Return to Emptiness: Stories (Colorado Book Award finalist); Lost Songs & Last Chances; and Asleep Beneath the Hill of Dreams.

Winner of the Colorado Book Award, Never Summer speaks tenderly...layered so the perception of reality becomes almost super-real.

The voice of these poems lives in myth and dream, and therefore holds the secrets of our deepest hopes and desires.

A Colorado Book Award finalist, "A Return to Emptiness" is a collection of short stories about life, loss, and love. In Ransick's words, "Loss is common to us all, yet multifarious in individual experience. I wrote these stories not primarily to describe loss but to circumscribe it--which is to say that I drew a circle of narratives round the experience to both locate and limit it. I was vaguely aware of this at the time of the writing. It's quite clear now. "Nobody gets out of this life without experiencing loss, as well as what is offered in recompense to those with the humility and quietude to accept emptiness. Stories are an ancient way of communicating experience and a collection of short fiction is a unique and complex symbol set that can, in the best cases, fill a void, turn loss to gain. If I had my way, this book would do that for the reader."