Living in the Resurrection Book

A stunning collection of poems caught in the tension between loving Home and anticipating its disappearance. It is a poetry of muted nostalgia ' never seeming to long for the return of what was, but unwilling to relinquish quiet, everyday, vivid recollections of a time for which he will remain the lone witness until they vanish with him.

Crunk's poetry has the quality of a worn down, coal country, working class Kentucky pastoralism. It is deeply connected to the land, to the native plants populating the poetic landscape, to the family who made him before exhausting back into the earth that sustained him, to the ordinariness of everyday objects that feel permanent even as they are seen fading.

So much is held in the collection's epigraph: "home is burning in me" (Lucille Clifton).

And so much again is held in the opening lines of the poem "Reunion" ' lines that illuminate the writer's necessary struggle to imagine a future beyond the roots he loves and knows so well:

"What we mistook for flight / was only the long struggle / to surface ..."

A very powerful, slim collection. Resonated with me a great deal.