Service

$19.95

by Grant Souders

How do we see the things that show us the other things we are among? The poems of Grant Souders’s first book are a conjuring. Service is born in utterance, with an opening eye, with the bareness that is there: the root of being in the word is. There’s an implication of narrative arc in the poet’s semblance of creation myth, beginning in nakedness and ending in everything. Here is a book that finds itself by leaving this world and reaching for the cosmos, if only to look back.

by Grant Souders

How do we see the things that show us the other things we are among? The poems of Grant Souders’s first book are a conjuring. Service is born in utterance, with an opening eye, with the bareness that is there: the root of being in the word is. There’s an implication of narrative arc in the poet’s semblance of creation myth, beginning in nakedness and ending in everything. Here is a book that finds itself by leaving this world and reaching for the cosmos, if only to look back.

About the Author

Grant Souders holds a BFA from Colorado State University and an MFA from the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop. He is co-author (with artist Nathaniel Whitcomb and musician Matthew Sage) of a collaborative music, art, and poetry book, A Singular Continent (Palaver Press, 2014). His poetry has appeared in the Denver Quarterly, iO, jubilat, and The Boston Review, and his visual art has been featured in a variety of Colorado galleries. He lives in Denver.

Advanced Praise

“[T]here is a materiality to language, but language is also not just pieces of furniture in a room. Words carry with them meaning, and that is a huge burden that language carries and what makes it different from other forms of art. Like, you know, G Sharp does not have a meaning. You might associate an emotion with the sound of it, but it doesn’t have meaning.” —Virginia McClure, “In Service of Sincerity: An Interview with Grant Souders” Los Angeles Review of Books / blog

“Souders risks that most dismissible of poetic virtues: sincerity. . . . Such sincerity reveals itself as a terrain, a ground, a place of founding and so also a place of finding. It makes of Souders’s poems something akin to ‘a fire to look at / and look by.’ The object of our meditation is also the object that gives us vision — the poem, these poems, which do not play for us a tune, but give us ‘a tune we could play into.’” — Dan Beachy-Quick, in a Boston Review “Poet’s Sampler”

Format: Paperback
ISBN: 978-1-936797-95-0