Winner of the 2017 Hopper Literary Magazine Poetry Prize

At a time when the human ravages on the planet seem to be reaching a crescendo, the poems in Bloom and Laceration offer lamentations to a fragmented world and celebrations of beauty’s fierce persistence. Here are lyric poems on the vicissitudes of family played out against wild (and domesticated) nature. Here are long meditations on passing through, on glimpsing, on transience and transcendence. From Southern California to Louisiana’s Gulf Coast, to the south of France, and especially to the hills and woods of Upstate New York, Black’s poems are full of wonder and ferocity, exuberance and sorrow.

Advance Praise
“By turns tender and serious, heartbroken and filled with heart, Ralph Black’s Bloom and Laceration is a praise song for the changing Earth, and for the families—human and otherwise—who populate it. . . . Those readers lucky enough to spend time with Bloom and Laceration will find pieces of these poems floating up later in the mind like the favorite lines to a hymn or psalm meant to make everyday life on this often-trying planet all the more bearable, and all the more holy.” —James Crews, author of Telling My Father

About the Author
Ralph Black was raised in Maryland and educated at the University of Oregon and New York University. His first collection of poems, Turning Over the Earth, was published by Milkweed Editions. He is also the author of a chapbook, The Apple Psalms.  Black is the recipient of the Anne Halley Poetry Prize from The Massachusetts Review and the Chelsea Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in The Georgia and Gettysburg Reviews, Orion, and West Branch. He lives in Rochester, NY, and teaches at SUNY, College at Brockport.

Specs
Bloom and Laceration
Poetry
Ralph Black
$14.95 for print
Paperback Original | 80 pages
5.5 x 8.5
ISBN: 978-0-9994995-7-3
Pub date: April 17, 2018

Buy the book here or visit your local, independent bookstore!