Gravity Well

Poetry. In GRAVITY WELL, Marc Rahe's incisive third collection, the poems beckon readers through an ever-shifting series of landscapes, drawing our gaze across a dynamic tableau--an octopus wearing a sweater, a white sky over the bridge we're standing on, flowers pressed into a forgotten book--as a means of revealing the most particular thrills and anxieties of the human condition. Unafraid and unwavering, careful and concerned, GRAVITY WELL propels its reader through the imagined apertures of the universe one striking image at a time, leaving us ocularly magnified in a world now seen anew. A singular voice in American poetry, Rahe deftly centers the body in relation to ailments such as love, decay, aging, friendship, and grief. His powerful, meditative plea is resounding: Earth, turn me.

Marc Rahe's luminous poems find grace in acts of intentional remembrance, in turning back to sing 'what can be seen / looking behind.' The speaker's world resembles our own fraught moment--fallen, divided--but never numb. These poems hum with moments of transcendence, between body and weather, air and breath, between today's pain and the deep wounds of the past. In precise, lucid lyrics, this voice insists that our capacity to feel is what binds us, ecstatically, to our planet and to one another.--Kiki Petrosino

Ever since his first book, THE SMALLER HALF, was published, I've kept my eyes open for new work by Marc Rahe, and whenever new work has come, I've celebrated, actually celebrated. No poet writing in English today is better at making poems stuffed full of being and of things seen, things heard, things touched, things tasted, and things thought hard about nonetheless quiet. And yet, though they approach silence, these poems resonate, and, like Rahe's previous work, they will resonate for years.--Shane McCrae