How Light Leaves (Paperback)
In HOW LIGHT LEAVES, James Crews gives readers what John Updike once famously called "the human news." He writes with raw honesty about the loss of his father and an ever-changing, yet consciously alive, natural world that promises relief from even the worst of our grief. These poems delve deeply and wholeheartedly into each moment, with scenes made transcendent by Crews' close observation of a world always accessible to us, which he reminds us "we can trace with our naked eyes.
James Crews' work has appeared in Ploughshares, Raleigh Review, Crab Orchard Review and The New Republic, among other journals, and he is a regular contributor to The (London) Times Literary Supplement. His first collection of poetry, The Book of What Stays, won the 2010 Prairie Schooner Book Prize and received a Foreword Magazine Book of the Year Award. Other awards include residencies from the Sitka Center for the Arts and Caldera Arts as well as two Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prizes. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing-Poetry from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a PhD in Writing and Literature from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where he was an Othmer Fellow and worked for Ted Kooser's American Life in Poetry newspaper column. He lives on an organic farm with his partner in Shaftsbury, Vermont and teaches in the low-residency MFA program at Eastern Oregon University.