Foreclosure

by Gregory Lawless

Praise for Foreclosure What a wonderful, bittersweet song is sung in these new poems by Gregory Lawless-something like a whisper made by a hammer. These beautifully tuned elegies move me with their stubborn, strange dreams of a house whose heart is ensnared. David Rivard, author of Otherwise, Elsewhere I'm afraid of these poems, which announce their calamities so calmly. Lawless teaches that while pure fixity may be foreclosed to us, knowledge & beauty are still resident-dazzlingly so-in the wrecked, the missing, & the restless. Kiki Petrosino, author of Hymn for the Black Terrific The poems of Gregory Lawless are austere, spare, and sharply observed, brief, skeptical, implicated as they sort through the rubble, and lively with movement. It's a bleak and terrified country in his Foreclosure prose poems, and he meets it with the counterweight of this inventive work that is firmly in the tradition of concrete and musical language which uses all of the tools of poetry. David Blair, author of Ascension Days

Genres: Poetry

36 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

Gregory Lawless is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and the author of I Thought I Was New Here (BlazeVOX, 2009), Dreamburgh, Pennsylvania (Dream Horse Press, forthcoming), Far Away (Red Mountain Press, forthcoming) and the chapbook Foreclosure (Back Pages Publishers, 2013). He is the is the winner of the 2013 Orphic Prize for Poetry and the 2014 Red Mountain Poetry Prize. His poems have been featured in such places as Pleiades, The Journal, Third Coast, Gulf Stream, The Cincinnati Review, Sixth Finch, La Petite Zine, Best of the Net, Verse Daily, and others.

Reviews

[Joseph Peterson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this short book of short poems. The narrator is a nearly ghostly presence drifting through the ruins of long abandoned dwellings that have been overtaken by bugs and bats and vines and brambles and woods. The word, "foreclosure", sits above many of these poems leaving the reader with the impression that the homes given up to ruin were abandoned in a hurry, perhaps at a moments notice death took them away leaving behind only the handiwork of their days: a fishing lure in the tree, a straw woman coming to pieces near an abandoned car, yard tires and washing tubs as memorials to the lost lives lived here. Crows and ravens occupy the trees and newly emerged pipes transporting the spoils of fracked fields to Texas snake through this wilderness. Gregory Lawless is an unerring poet and roaming these ruins inspires him to sing with the birds. I highly recommend this collection.

[Tucker · Rating 5 out of 5]

Spare, careful poems exploring the meanings of houses and other things in disrepair.

[Robb Todd]

Another great collection from Gregory Lawless. He stares at things many would look away from--and there is immeasurable value in that.

[Melinda Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good characters, but I felt that the book ended too quickly. Not enough closure on all the issues. Interesting tho!