Everywhere West

Poetry. The poems in Chris Green's EVERYWHERE WEST stand in the light and dark of family life and are bowled over by the beauty of fatherhood. Like a novel, the poetry asks over and over, What's worth living for? The book also explores living in America at a time when basic human value is being hacked and discontinued. The poetry stands and says I am happy and I am not happy. Nothing is simple about being a child and parent, and through complications of time and grief, the book is crowded with hope. Each poem in Chris Green's new collection is a hero of honesty. Each poem is a map to the center of the most human part of the heart. A map to the moments that might be too average to the average eye. But aren't. Often they are moments of subtle awe for the female. Wife, daughters, Mother, Nature. Green's knowing, an owning of his place in the bigger picture. His own father-ness.--cin salach This is Chris Green at his finest: the poet as naturalist. Green's naturalism is not, however, one of pinched concision, or remote observation. Rather, in EVERYWHERE WEST, we get poems of engagement and of grace, poems in which the ordinary becomes marvelous. Being father, son, husband, friend, animal lover, and global citizen, are quotidian pleasures, to be sure, but in these poems, they become uncanny and vertiginous as well.--Liam Heneghan The poems here are heavy with memory and bright with refracted light--like river stones, lovely and tactile, irresistible to the hand and heart. Chris Green fully inhabits the moment each poem happens, then leads us into that moment's center where everything blooms 'rainbow rainbow rainbow.' EVERYWHERE WEST makes me feel almost unspeakably human.--Jan Bottiglieri The warm, empathic poems in Chris Green's latest collection are a life-affirming, alternative reality to the 'loneliness business' of America's 'huge and swollen darkness.' With crisp language and formal dexterity, Green finds dignity and grace in the domestic, celebrating the everyday exuberance of love's steady radiance.--Tony Trigilio