High Wire

In varied landscapes-from Chicago to Miami, Paris to Rio, High Wire explores universal emotional territory: the "shaky, thin wire we all must tread" in "these dire, barely translatable, times." But translate the poet does. Here, through the everyday of beauty of "brazen-faced marigolds" or the in macabre memory of a drowned fisherman, Stephen Anderson looks unflinchingly at the "jarring and jagged cut-you-up things," but ultimately attests to the way "true things linger." These stirring poems probe the mysterious edges of those true things, that "juncture of the lucid and the luminous." Follow this poet's vision as he brings us "hawk swoops" or Van Gogh's "cocaine of pure genius," as he reminds us to marvel at the cornucopia, before the moments "pass us by like fireflies in the night."

-Kimberly Blaeser, author of Copper Yearning, Wisconsin Poet Laureate 2015-16

The poems in Stephen Anderson's High Wire consistently engage and enthrall the reader, whether visiting Neruda's house and harvesting poems written on leaves or attending to his dying mother in the hospital. The focus of the poems in this collection is truly cosmopolitan, ranging from Milwaukee to Chile, Panama to Paris, Brooklyn to Mexico, with each poem rather like "a field of sunflowers lighting the way." As in the title of one of the poems, "Looking for Seashells," Anderson is always in quest of that momentary glimpse when reality shows through the surface of creation. Like Karl Wallenda balancing on a tight rope, Anderson nimbly traverses this high wire act, each poem a successful step above the abyss.

- Timothy Walsh, author of When the World Was Rear-Wheel Drive

In High Wire, Stephen Anderson's new and selected poems, we encounter a speaker who dreams for us of "seeing life with one's heart" in the midst of "sheet-metal pipe, oxidized iron clump, Big Mac Wrappers and pizza box and toxic dump." Anderson's early Peace Corps experience in Chile and university teaching in London give the poems political weight and global scope. His poems offer sorrow and hope, believing, in "Song of Graffiti," that what is said matters, can "stoke a war and, later, entreat peace"..."turn around a life." This is a poet who balances clear sight and open heart in a high wire act of his own.

- Robin Chapman, author of The Only Home We Know