The Blue-Collar Sun

Overview

'The world is hard to find once you start looking for it'—from its beginning, this book activates such a search (and sometimes wants to walk away from it). By the breath-taking final section, the poet finds himself searching for his relationship to a fish hook, which of all objects looks most like a question mark, so the search becomes not one for answers but for the questions themselves, that Rilkean stance. Questions carry with them the obligation to go on, to carry on in any direction they may take us, and for the sake of the art of poetry Lucas Farrell does just that. His is a mind that never stops moving.

Reviews

"Lucas Farrell's new collection of poetry rises over an arresting landscape of contrasts and revelations. It encompasses stanzaic verse, prose-poems, and script-like dialogue. What unifies this diverse book as a dramatic arc is ultimately Farrell's alert, authentic voice, which is at once passionate and utterly unsentimental. He invites a reader to join him on the daily rounds of attentiveness to the longing and the loss, the passion and the humor, in life's always inescapable and always fleeting presentness." —John Elder, author of Picking up the Flute and co-editor of The Norton Book of Nature Writing

Author Biography

Lucas Farrell lives in Vermont, where he and his wife own and operate Big Picture Farm, a small hillside goat dairy and award-winning farmstead confectionery. His first book of poems, The Many Woods of Grief (University of Massachusetts Press), was awarded the Juniper Prize for Poetry. He has two daughters.