Old Stranger
". . . Writing as a weapon and tool, by turns delivering incisive wit and dislodging memories. . . Amid losses, restitutions, and unknowns, this volume sustains an appealing verve."
—Publishers Weekly
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Praise for Old Stranger:
“Joan Larkin’s much-awaited Old Stranger: Poems is a miracle of compression, mystery, and innuendo. Here is a poet for whom craft is an extension of wisdom. Whether revealing the archetype secreted within an object, or the elemental, persistent grief within a memory, Larkin expertly hones the edges of poems like a luthier shapes a violin.”
—DIANE SEUSS, author of frank: sonnets
“To discover the ‘old stranger’ is a knife, not quite, it’s an old piano. No, it’s a book about mortality and the debt of flesh, about love, rot, relationship, smiles that cut like knives through every seeing moment. It’s about painting. It’s a beaut. There’s so much masterpiece here. I mean wow this is why one is a poet all their life. To make this.”
—EILEEN MYLES, author of a “Working Life”