NEPC member Ralph Culver’s new collection A Passable Man is just out from MadHat Press (madhat-press.com) to excellent reviews, including Nina MacLaughlin in The Boston Globe on 12/09/21.
Praise for A Passable Man
“Ralph Culver’s first full-length collection, A Passable Man (MadHat), gives the feel of a fire outside at night — something warm and smoldering in the cold, something flaming, and temporary in its burn. We are alive right now, these poems seem to say, and that will not always be the case. Culver, who lives in Vermont, aims his attention on the push-pull of the fiery present, its quotidian joys and pains: a woodpecker at the suet, new ice skates on fresh ice, mending with thread, and the losses present and long-gone that haunt in their various spoken and unspoken ways. “We gather / in the space of our flesh / to witness/ what never can happen again, / not ever,” he writes. In one poem, a boy finds a rotting corpse of a dog, detaches its head, mounts its skull on a stick and walks to a playground. These are physical poems, attuned to natural rhythms and those rhythms’ effects on spirit and body both. “The fire cannot feed without eating its home … the wave craves the loss of itself.” Quiet wisdom, which is the best kind of wisdom, lives in his lines.”
—Nina MacLaughlin, The Boston Globe
Readings
Ralph will give a reading at the Grolier Poetry Book Shop in Cambridge, Mass. on Friday, January 28, 2022 at 7 p.m.
Purchase
The book is available now from the MadHat website, in book stores, and on Amazon.