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Someone You Love is Still Alive
by Ephraim Scott Sommers
82 pages ~ 36 poems
Cover and interior design by Daniel Krawiec
Price: $17.00
ISBN:978-0-936481-35-7
Publisher: Jacar Press
To order:www.jacarpress.com
ABOUT THE BOOK: Someone You Love is Still Alive was chosen by Ireland's Mary O'Donnell as the winner
of the Jacar Press Full-Length poetry collection competition. It will be shpped mid November.
ADVANCE PRASIE:
"Someone You Love is Still Alive" compels the reader to remember that they are,
after all, still human. Despite a fractured world, a challengingexperience of
what it is to be a member of a global society, intimate connections still bind
us. When the poet writes "My name is sometimes the wound, sometimes the weapon"
s/he makes a case for the twin in all of us, the twin of creation and destruction,
of love and hate. The language in which the poems are grounded is rich, it is
anti- performance and pro-reading, proving a sensitivity to the rhythms and
medi- tativeness which are the tuning mechanisms of the finest poetry. The voice
is authoritative but never harsh, and that most important consideration of all,
tone, characterised by a mix of tenderly expressed feeling and a brave kind of
horror at the state of the world. It is a poetry we as readers need.
—Mary O'Donnell
Someone You Love Is Still Alive is a beautiful book about love and survival in
the in the face of institutions that work to make something as genuine as desire
improbable. Ephraim Scott Sommers deftly takes on nation, religion, and even
marriage itself. And when I say takes on, I mean that these poems find him
asking how he dare enjoy the privilege of what he questions: "And I don't know/what
the bible/of my want for him/would even look like…" This is a gorgeous
and dangerous
book.
— Jericho Brown Award-winning poet
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Ephraim Scott Sommers is a singer-songwriter and poet. He is the author of The
Night We Set the Dead Kid on Fire (2017), winner of the 2016 Patricia Bibby First
Book Award. His recent work has appeared in Prairie Schooner , TriQuarterly,
VerseDaily, and elsewhere. An assistant professor of English at Winthrop University,
Ephraim lives in Rock Hill, South Carolina with his wife, Ann Reilly-Sommers.
FROM THE BOOK:
This Impossible Kiss
by Ephraim Scott Sommers
In the dry fountain at the center
of the Sunken Gardens, on one foot,
a woman in a coat of living pigeons
holds her breath, and—hallelujah—
where always there is doubt,
I am not afraid to call this belief.
Soon, someone already ashamed says,
she will lift her arms
like a conductor,
and they'll scatter right off
of her. We'll be on our own
again. But think of them
together this second, Lover.
I know you, Lover
a piece of something
about to unfold
but holding
while, everywhere, people say,
Look! The World's wings
are coming apart.
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