Portulans
80 pages
|
5 1/2 x 8 1/2
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© 2021
- Contents
- Review Quotes
Table of Contents

Contents
Acknowledgments
Soul
The Expedition
The Most I Took Back from a Dream
In the Basement Is the Previous Culture
Satori
Changing the Script
Wakened to a Certain Knowledge of a Limited Kind
Multiverse
Incident at the Mother’s
Four Photos and Brief Case Report from the Journal Surgery
In the Moment before the Call Drops 23
In Their Nature: A Trio of Neighbors in a Sidewalk Chat
Children Wearing My Shoes
He Thinks
To Myself in the Coming Time
Billy’s Facts of Life
At the Friends of the Library Local Authors Event
Lot’s Daughters
The Old Art
Apollo Takes the Trophy of Marsyas
L. Receives Honorable Mention in Late Middle Age
What Men Want
Grudge
Attention
Review Quotes
Peter Campion, author of One Summer Evening at the Falls
“The beauty of Portulans comes not only from Sommer’s formal gracefulness, but also from his matching that virtuosity with mortal stakes. Poems like ‘Incident at the Mother’s,’ ‘Attention,’ and ‘Billy’s Facts of Life’ reveal narrative skill and unsentimental depth of sympathy that little contemporary fiction can equal, while ‘Multiverse’ and ‘In the Basement Is the Previous Culture’ display Sommer’s sheer capacity of imagination. Open to spontaneity while masterfully carved, these poems are alive to our moment, which they will outlast.”
Mary Szybist, author of Incarnadine
“‘There are no words / beneath the shape of things,’ Sommer concedes, but his poems almost make one believe that there could be. With the care and precision of a navigator trying to discern paths that won’t simply circle back, he bypasses metaphors gone wrong, riding a syntax supple enough to hold the music of the ‘the mind’s buoyant gravities.’ The many kinds of rhymes in this collection are invitations to listen closely to the layers of history and myth that hum beneath thinking. ‘It’s inner space he’s after,’ and he takes us there.”
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