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."

Return to Emptiness

Literature & Fiction

Ransick, Chris

Genre Fiction

Bower House

Chris Ransick¿s first full length collection of poetry, Never Summer, has been hailed by one critic who described the work as "accessible, haunting, echoing familiar emotions in brilliant language that, quite frankly, is amazing." Another offered the following comments: "These are carefully crafted, hard-hitting, real-life poems. Ransick¿s unerring sense of place and evocative imagery range boldly and broadly from childhood through fatherhood, from the quietude of the garden to the majesty and endlessness of the Western landscape. The reader will not go away hungry."

Never Summer

Poetry

Pronghorn Pr

Never Summer: Poems from Thin Air

In Colorado Book Award Winner Chris Ransick's Never Summer: Poems From Thin Air, poetry flows like a stream collecting the debris of love, fear, and frailty. At each eddying current, tiny details of everyday life are exquisitely unfurledand enlarged to reveal a world as familiar as a child falling asleep on her father's shoulder; as whimsical as an afternoon spent watching girls playing rugby; as unnatural as the dead dancing in the snow. Approachable and imaginative, Ransick's authentic collection received accolades upon its original publication. Here it is again in a beautiful hardback edition-with ten new poems-to rediscover or explore anew.

Ghost Road Pub Group Inc

In this lyrical and mature follow-up to the award-winning and critially acclaimed Never Summer: Poems From Thin Air, Denver poet laureate Chris Ransick's newest collection maps the intersections of the natural world's austere and grand beauty against the resiliency and power of the imagination, which in these poems swell and soar in opposition to the constraints and uncertainties of modern life. The collection is organized into a series of suites that range from "An American Boyhood" to the "Motorcycle" to "Seasons," and like the facets of a Cubist painting, the poems in each suite reveal tiny fissures of experience and perception, evoking a better sense of its whole. Ransick's eye for detail, his talent for magnifying nuance, brings out the wonder and mystery of what we might consider, upon first glance, as merely ordinary.

Lost Songs & Last Chances

"Following Richard Hugo as much as John Wesley Powell, Chris Ransick is an exacting cartographer of the West's vast landscapes, physical and emotional, rendering them with such care you will agree with him. "This is where/you have always lived, no matter what they say." -- Jake Adam York author of Murder Ballads 
 "Chris Ransick shares with the reader a sense of the human experience that is both a part of and apart from the natural world." -- The Billings Outpost

Asleep Beneath the Hill of Dreams

Ghost Road Press

"The voice of these poems lives in myth and dream, and therefore holds the secrets of our deepest hopes and desires. Ransick knows how to beautifully turn a line, forging music and image into moments masterfully crafted-moments that contain the high and low, bird wing and cloud, screwballs and mud. These poems haunt, humor, and cajole, while moving the reader to higher ground. They lift the reader up and give her a new perspective on what it is to be human." --Michael Henry

Language for the Living and the Dead

"Never Summer" speaks tenderly...layered so the perception of reality becomes almost super-real. This book is an everyday world where tragedy and bad news occasionally intrude. So does an ironic humor. Through all the ups and downs, there is a thread of confidence in the future, the belief that "we will build a lasting home."

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. Personal and intimate, the words reach out and evoke the constraints of modern life soaring above them to reveal fissures of experience and perception where mysteries and wonder exist which may be considered, at a glance, merely ordinary. 

Praise for Joe the Ghost\nIn Joe the Ghost, Chris Ransick’s narrator speaks from what the Celts call the “thin place,” a world between corporeal and spirit. From his transcendent perspective, Joe fully inhabits his earthly body and its delights, yet simultaneously leaves them far behind. This is a soaring collection, the work of a master who left us at the pinnacle of his powers. As Ransick writes, “I forgive I forgive I forgive myself for the / song I ran out of time to sing.” These poems will continue to sing long after we, too, are out of time. 
—Joy Roulier Sawyer, author of Lifeguards and Tongues of Men and Angels\nChris Ransick was my good friend. I have never seen a poet grow by such leaps as Chris accomplished in the last two years of his short life, and these final books, Temporary House and Joe the Ghost, catch him at his best, darkly funny, humane, eager for life. He once told my students that poetry was the antidote to the mediocrity and dreck of ordinary life. His conversation was like that, like music, reaching into joy. I miss him terribly. 
—David Mason, former Colorado poet laureate, author of Ludlow: A Verse Novel\nOnly a few strong poets—Keats comes to mind—have had the ability and courage to look their own approaching death in the eye and craft memorable work not only in spite of that fact, but also out of it. Chris Ransick belongs in this company. To have known and loved Chris makes Joe the Ghost almost unbearable, but it is also unbearably beautiful, a joyous, painful and profound meditation on the end of life and the ends of life by a poet who was taken from us, at the height of his powers, far too soon. I am grateful to have known Chris and to be haunted from this day forward by Joe the Ghost, who speaks “the necessary wisdom that always goes unheard.” 
—David J. Rothman, author of My Brother’s Keeper, Colorado Book Award Finalist, former Poet Laureate of Colorado’s 
Western Slope, former Resident Poet of Colorado Public Radio.\nI do not have the words to prepare a reader for the impact of reading the soaring yet gentle farewell embodied in Chris Ransick’s poetry collection Joe the Ghost. The art that poet’s practice allows for an occasional definitive statement on leaving, but in this book, we actually get an entire collection built to pass on all the warmth and wisdom that this great poet possesses. Read this book, soon--it’s that important. 
—J Diego Frey, author of Umbrellas or Else and The Year the Eggs Cracked\nAbout The Author\nChris Ransick, Denver Poet Laureate from 2006-2010, was an award winning author of six books of poetry and fiction. He was born and raised in upstate New York and lived in Colorado, Montana, Wyoming, California, and Oregon. He worked as a journalist, editor, professor, and speaker and served on his city's public library board, his state's humanities board of directors, and on the PEN Freedom to Write Committee. His first book, Never Summer, won a 2003 Colorado Book Award for Poetry. His book of short stories, A Return to Emptiness, was a 2005 Colorado Book Award for fiction finalist. His stories and poems have been presented on television, radio, and stage, including collaborations with Ballet Nouveau Colorado. He was a faculty member from 2005-2019 at Lighthouse Writers Workshop, Denver's independent creative writing school. Lighthouse awarded him the 2013 Beacon Award for Teaching Excellence. Chris held his final reading at Lighthouse Writers Workshop on September 25, 2019. His two works, Joe The Ghost and Temporary House were published posthumously by Middle Creek Publishing in 2022.

Joe The Ghost

Middle Creek Publishing & Audio

Praise for Temporary House\nChris Ransick writes eloquently of the domestic and quotidian in Temporary House: fresh bread baking in the oven, a dog’s love and loyalty, coaxing gardens through every season. In this posthumous collection, readers will find the poet’s characteristic sagacity, as well as sardonic humor. Ransick’s poetry continues to cast a rare light in the world. When he tells us, “The next garden will be / as beautiful, you just / wait and see,” we believe him—because we’ve learned to trust his singular voice, in all things poetic and beyond. 
— Joy Roulier Sawyer, author of Lifeguards and Tongues of Men and Angels\nTemporary House is a powerful book. It captures Chris Ransick’s muse in full cry, expressing where lifelong devotion to his art had brought him before the catastrophe of cancer struck. In much of this work Chris is a master symbolist. A mysterious and meaningful spiritual world shimmers behind or within our daily lives. 
— David J. Rothman, author of My Brother’s Keeper, Colorado Book Award Finalist; former Poet Laureate of 
Colorado’s Western Slope; former Resident Poet of Colorado Public Radio\nI have never seen a poet grow by such leaps as Chris accomplished in the last two years of his short life, and these final books, Temporary House and Joe the Ghost, catch him at his best, darkly funny, humane, eager for life. 
—David Mason, former Colorado Poet Laureate, author of Ludlow: A Verse Novel\nTemporary House by Chris Ransick is filled with precise and surprising language play. There is a sympathy for the homeless, the abused, and a love and celebration of the natural world. These poems are highly imagistic and lyrical. Ransick masters the nuances of form and sound. These poems are packed with meaning and wisdom. This is a gorgeous collection. 
—Sheryl Luna, author of Magnificent Errors, Seven, and Pity the Drowned Horses\nEmpathy and wisdom are hallmarks of Chris Ransick’s poetry and nowhere is this more powerfully display than is his collection, Temporary House. From the rising scent of a newly seeded garden bed, or the soaring commentary of a raven in sky, to the broken wheel of a bicycle that has left behind by the abrupt flight of troubled neighbors, Chris examines a life, and finds every life—waiting for an acceptance, a landing, a home. I’ll will read and re-read this book for years to come. 
—J Diego Frey, author of Umbrellas or Else and The Year the Eggs Cracked\nABOUT THE AUTHOR\nChris Ransick, Denver Poet Laureate from 2006-2010, was an award winning author of six books of poetry and fiction. He was born and raised in upstate New York and lived in Colorado, Montana, Wyoming, California, and Oregon. He worked as a journalist, editor, professor, and speaker and served on his city's public library board, his state's humanities board of directors, and on the PEN Freedom to Write Committee. His first book, Never Summer, won a 2003 Colorado Book Award for Poetry. His book of short stories, A Return to Emptiness, was a 2005 Colorado Book Award for fiction finalist. His stories and poems have been presented on television, radio, and stage, including collaborations with Ballet Nouveau Colorado. He was a faculty member from 2005-2019 at Lighthouse Writers Workshop, Denver's independent creative writing school. Lighthouse awarded him the 2013 Beacon Award for Teaching Excellence. Chris held his final reading at Lighthouse Writers Workshop on September 25, 2019. His two works, Joe The Ghost and Temporary House were published posthumously by Middle Creek Publishing in 2022.

Temporary House

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Books by Ransick, Chris

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Ransick, Chris. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Return to Emptiness

Never Summer

Never Summer: Poems from Thin Air

Lost Songs & Last Chances

Asleep Beneath the Hill of Dreams

Language for the Living and the Dead

Never Summer

Lost Songs & Last Chances

Joe The Ghost

Temporary House