La Far

“Linsker’s poems splice and complicate realms and modes and sensory domains with wit and acute musical edgework. They are deeply, quixotically enjoined in the hard and essential ‘grief of eternal joy.’”—Emily Wilson, judge, 2013 Iowa Poetry Prize

“Eric Linsker knows that poetry has an unavoidable politics, that there is no way it can be otherwise. And yet he also knows that poetry’s powers often come from glancing at the huge, such as the deaths that resulted from the protests around the building of the power plant in Dongzhou, and yet in the next moment wandering away to notice something quiet about sparrows, something about how they peck at frozen water. So he has written La Far, a book that dwells in muted devotion, that resonates from a willingness to wander both toward and away, often at the same time.”—Juliana Spahr

“This book thinks the open, enlivened by material urgency, met in verse sounded through the long Western romantic torrent of enclosure, verdure, slaughter and soul. How its honeyed years are built in other’s blood. Open against privation’s time. Open into an earth made of anguish named a ‘garden.’ Thus to open heaven, to open like a broken heart is open—open out.”—Dana Ward