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"Why do the best of Chris Abbate’s poems make me cry? Could it be envy, because they’re so good they make me wish I’d written them? Could it be the sadness, vulnerability, and love mixed in with the playfulness of these poems? Or maybe their numinousness, which is also always somehow subtly part of the mix? Or is it simply that voice, finally, of “an ache of a boy,” its honesty, its accessibility, its tenderness, speaking a sort of “unspoken language of boys,” especially to those of us who most needed a voice like Abbate’s back in our own boyhoods, and still sorely need it today? It’s all these things. And it’s also because, as with any great music, beautiful singing can have that effect on us. And we wipe our eyes so that we may keep on reading."
~ Paul Hostovsky
~ Paul Hostovsky
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Bookstores where Words for Flying is available
Bookmarks 634 W. Fourth St. Winston-Salem, NC Malaprops Bookstore/Cafe 55 Haywood St. Asheville, NC Quail Ridge Books 4209-100 Lassiter Mill Rd., Raleigh, NC |
Scuppernong Books 304 S. Elm St., Greensboro, NC So & So Books 704 N. Person St., Raleigh, NC Wake County (North Carolina) Libraries |
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Sample poems
Canine Study #1: A River, Flowing I’ve stopped asking the dog about his day. Instead, I ponder the moon while he empties his bladder over a crescent of periwinkle around the mailbox. I carry him inside each night and hold him to know what it is like to feel everything. Tomorrow, I will commit the original sin of self-consciousness and will crease the fine tablecloth of a new day. To me, eternity is like a car, passing, but to him, it is a river, flowing. No wonder his life is so short. All that ecstasy, I couldn’t stand to bear it. |
God, Bowling When the thunderclap was a cosmic crash, when it shook the foundation of the house until the vibration rippled upstairs to the room my brother and I shared, we called it a strike. And when it sounded like a train that had passed, a rumbling in the distance, the sky merely clearing its throat, we admitted that even God sometimes threw a gutter ball. The only picture of my grandfather I remember is him in a suit and tie holding a bowling ball to his heart, eyeing pins at the end of a lane. His obituary from 1959 read, Giuseppe Stefano, Expert Duckpin Bowler; not what my mother had told me about him – farmer, immigrant, factory worker, gardener – but rather, what I imagined him to be – herder of storm clouds, gatherer of sky, hands that make thunder. |
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“God is the glue for connection and mystery in Chris Abbate’s Talk About God, a masterful debut collection. These poems are about his Catholic childhood, the yearning to break away from convention and the unyielding need for patterns to manage the unforgiving nature of life. Yet, most of all, these poems speak of the connections between fathers and sons, husbands and wives, and friends and neighbors. Abbate explores the chaos of adolescence and many years later, reflects on the breakup of his parents’ over fifty-year marriage through the exacting lens of ritual and geometry with carefully nuanced images that earn every bit of their screen time. Every poem in Talk About God reminds you to feel gratitude for the beauty of the present moment and not to forget how you can create a joyous and meaningful life.”
~ Alice Osborn, author of Heroes without Capes
In Chris Abbate’s new collection, Talk About God, we find a depth of faith in everyday moments. It is found in delivering newspapers in winter and in the comfort of platters of cavatelli. Reading these artfully constructed poems, we are “waiting on gravity,” sitting on the edge of our seats for the next word – the next achingly beautiful image. These poems sing with authenticity and grace. We enter a world where, “God moves from the inside out.”
~ Cristina M. R. Norcross, Editor, Blue Heron Review. Author of Still Life Stories and Amnesia and Awakenings
~ Alice Osborn, author of Heroes without Capes
In Chris Abbate’s new collection, Talk About God, we find a depth of faith in everyday moments. It is found in delivering newspapers in winter and in the comfort of platters of cavatelli. Reading these artfully constructed poems, we are “waiting on gravity,” sitting on the edge of our seats for the next word – the next achingly beautiful image. These poems sing with authenticity and grace. We enter a world where, “God moves from the inside out.”
~ Cristina M. R. Norcross, Editor, Blue Heron Review. Author of Still Life Stories and Amnesia and Awakenings
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Bookstores where Talk About God is available
Malaprops Bookstore/Cafe 55 Haywood St. Asheville, NC Quail Ridge Books 4209-100 Lassiter Mill Rd. Raleigh, NC Scuppernong Books 304 S. Elm St., Greensboro, NC |
So & So Books 704 N. Person St. Raleigh, NC The Country Bookshop 140 NW Broad St. Southern Pines, NC Wake County (North Carolina) Libraries |
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Sample poems
To My Brother and Sisters A girl and boy meeting over a toboggan after a February blizzard launching their bodies into a winter courtship a fall wedding a suburban ranch with green shrubs a white mailbox post and inside mixing their bodies together like water and flour to make you and you and me and then you crawling walking earnest determined our adjectives scattering into glass rooms miles from the original hill its inadvertent snow still whisking their diligent bodies young and clamorous their joyous winged bodies pressed together under teenage clothes headlong into a blank canvas her arms circling his waist their eyes full ahead their laughing mouths a verb like a toboggan carving outlines of us in the trail behind them |
Paper Route When it snowed the car would be warming in the driveway. By the time I got outside the newspapers for my route had been stacked in expectant piles in the backseat of Dad’s Oldsmobile. He steered with one knee while his ink-black fingers lifted coffee to his lips. He stopped every few houses for me to deliver yesterday’s news to my vigilant customers. The orange beat of hazard lights cut through snowy dawn, heralding our arrival. One morning the car got stuck, the tires spinning a groove in the snow. Before I could get out to push, Dad handed me his half-empty mug, popped the trunk and retrieved a small shovel and a bucket with sand. From the side view mirror I watched the crown of his head bob, his shoulders hunch into digging and tossing, and the ephemeral ghosts of his labor; the vapor he breathed into an oncoming winter he despised. After he had folded himself again behind the wheel and I had returned his coffee, I asked why he got up to drive me. He replied that he loved me, then gently pressed the accelerator – enough for the sand to do its work and the tires against the sand and our bodies over the tires – plodding us along this daily route in spite of winter. Not up and away, but out and back around, always returning a little lighter to the place we began. |