Studies Inside the Consent of a Distance

In Ken Meisel's masterfully artistic Studies Inside the Consent of a Distance, Meisel explores that existential insight with stunning intelligence and surprising connections creating a vibrant uncertainty about the stability of reality and the primarily unrecognized consequences. We suddenly see "bird feathers/bouncing in the waves/in a design variation," "a dress somnambulant/and accidental," and "ovular berries spotted with small, /black doll's eyes/wandering column-like." Everything is transformed into a multiple of contexts. Everything now depends on an infinite number of red wheelbarrows. Meisel reveals that we are never in a singular, predictable, nameable world. As he appropriately appropriates in his closing, we are simply here where "they saw the sun, /setting behind it, /all the world, a stage."

- Jack Ridl, author of Broken Symmetry (Named Poetry Book of the Year by The Society of Midland Authors), and Practicing to Walk Like a Heron (recipient of ForeWord/Indie Reviews Best Collection of Poetry published by a university or small press), and most recently Saint Peter and the Goldfinch

Ken Meisel is a poetic decathlete, and with each new collection he displays his prowess at a new event on new mastered terrain. Studies Inside the Consent of a Distance is such an event. The book, in fact, is a poetic triathlon, broken into three separate meditations on the themes of connectedness, separation, our human role in closing the distance, and respecting the need for consent in that transaction. Like Whitman or a Native American shaman, Meisel observes the natural world, letting it show us the bond between hawks, rivers, trees, cicadas, white baneberry, the hungry, and all "the earth's inhabitants" as they teach us that "we reach what is God only by what we witness." Meisel understands that what we witness also witnesses us, and the deft eye and ear with which he captured the urban landscape of a decaying Detroit in past collections are opened to a larger set of truths. These poems call on you to see the distances in your own life, to work inside and experience the often strange loops that envelope us all and to seek a harmonious consent on a world stage - to question, in essence, what it means to truly be alive. Connect with these poems - your life will be richer.

- John Jeffire, author of A Temple for Tomorrows and Shoveling Snow in a Snowstorm

Having just returned from a fly fishing trip, I'm inspired to think of how poet Ken Meisel is not unlike an expert angler. His words are rod, line and fly, back casting into memory and then loading the weight of those remembrances forward into the trajectory of the present. And always with a spirit for depths, the mystery of what's beneath the surface, and what might rise when one's bait most mimics life.

- Jeff Vande Zande, author of American Poet