Skating Rough Ground

Praise for J. S. Absher’s poetry:Night Weather: Absher’s poems are airy, piercingly bright, yet willing to settle briefly on your palm. Never can they be pinched between thumb and forefinger like a dead specimen. Open to any page, touch your tongue to a line, inhale the pinprick drop of scent as from honeysuckle flower. In the book, the seasons of haiku are punctuated by longer poems, but even these retain the sense of being present in their one precise moment.—Bill Griffin, author of Treestory: River Story and Crossing the River, from his review in Griffinpoetry.comMouth Work: Some of Absher's poems are playful, like “We Last as Long as the Dew.” Some of them are so gorgeous I want to read the whole thing to you. And what runs through the book is the relationship between father and son. Some of the jumps of thought are almost miraculous: How do you go from here to here? How did you know it would be so perfect?—Orson Scott Card, “Uncle Orson Reviews Everything,” September 15, 2016One of the finest poems in the book is “How to Write a Thank You Note,” an inspired, odd mix of a gratitude list and quotations from a book on letter writing. It’s not only a song of thanks for a host of plants and animals (and more), but also a celebration of words and sounds: “For these I am thankful: for cara-rayada and mirikina, / for schmalschnauzige and potto and cuchumbi, and for all / milky plants, dandelion, milkweed, and sow-thistle: shushuk! bhulan!” The poem continues with its list, building and gathering emotion, until it ends with a triplet of exclamatories…. Mouth Work ends up being a testament to language.– Susan Laughter Meyers, “Poems of the Elemental: Heart and Home,” North Carolina Literary Review Online 2017