The poems of Lose to Find are above all a call to clarity, to pure imagistic witness in forms both familiar and experimental, from the brilliant evocation of how “Nightjars dive into an echo” to the lonely & lovely call-and-response of found texts (“meet me at the schoolyard, like before” a lover’s typed voice calls; “under moonglow and want” the loved taps back). You read these poems and you come out the other side chastened and charmed by a sense both of longing and of profound gratitude.–John Blair, author of Playful Song Called Beautiful (Univ. of Iowa Press), winner of the 2016 Iowa Poetry Prize. These are poems in search of light – light that transforms, sparks, and lifts, and in which selves are reflected, faces revealed as open or closed. But along the way there is a persistent heaviness. Silence, darkness, and the “sprawl and everywhere-ness” of the “unmade” threaten to choke the sparse, compressed utterance before the light can break through. In this, as in all good poetry, Steve Wilson’s poems enact what they describe, risking everything to find light and love even in the face of loss.–David Hadbawnik is a poet and translator whose last book was Virgil’s Aeneid, books 1-6 (Shearsman Books, 2015). Holy Sonnets to Orpheus and Other Poems is forthcoming from Delete Press.
