Tales of a Distance

Poetry can speak most resonantly at those times when the distance between our lives and death shrinks, times such as when a parent dies, and we relearn what intimacy in a family context can mean. Such is the beautiful intensity of Andrew Gottlieb's poems in this collection, written with crystalline images and mindful presence. I'm especially captured by how rivers, animals, and landscapes of the American West inhabit the poems as talismans for the inseparability of mind and nature. And for the mystery of how we find beauty while living on the edge of peril.

-Alison Hawthorne Deming, author of A Woven World and Stairway to Heaven

There is scant rhyme but abundant reason to get close to Andrew Gottlieb's Tales of a Distance. Intimacy resides in his far away as comfort winds its way into his wildness. Broken form seems his fix for convention. There's much to admire in Andy's artistry but perhaps most endearing is the invitation the words make to sit and absorb beasts and human beings, the out there and the inside, with equal ease.

-J. Drew Lanham, author of The Home Place and Sparrow Envy

With a pleasant density that is relished and an enacted physicality that is revered, Gottlieb's robust cosmology comes to us via field sermon and tourist canoe, via wheelchair fugue and coyote anthem. Everywhere there is rare sense of the poet having fully inhabited not only locations but his own "inner wild." What is gifted the reader, then, (through formal mastery, it should be added) are not mere snapshots but an elemental authenticity that grounds us, again and again, on the edge of the luminous void.

-Chris Dombrowski, author of Body of Water and Ragged Anthem