The graceful poems in Lee Slonimsky's new collection are those of a born naturalist gifted with urbane insights, verse assembled from careful observation and remarkable emotional investment, animated by anxiety, absorbed with precision. His engagement with the natural world-tellingly there are many birds and bees, though always alongside more sinister blackbirds, crows, and alligators-borrows strength from navigating "terrain as gnarled and buckled as a tree." His characters, money managers, lawyers, commodities traders, yearn to return to a simpler, more honest way of life, perhaps return to a natural state, all the while confronting the reality that "whirls and flashes that compose you are / mere etches in cold space." An enchanting and thought-provoking collection.
Ernest Hilbert, author of All of You on the Good Earth
In Wandering Electron, Lee Slonimsky creates a shiny braid of nature and spirit. We become eager armchair travelers as these intelligent, deeply sensuous poems act as guides to worlds within worlds-"where light weighs the most," where a camel broods over "stars reflected in a puddle," and more. We are handed a Whitmanesque sense of being "for this is the time for spinning to stop/even electrons need to nap," and become synesthetes as we, thanks to Slonimsky, "hear oak's true color." Wandering Electron is a collection filled with this poet's particular magic found in snow, icicles, pine. If they are about any one thing, these poems are about a type of salvation, man not only returning to nature but remembering he is, in fact, part of nature. He lives in a stunning world where a "gold shaft" of light becomes "a flower in a mirror," a sensual world where a love affair exists "between soft misty breeze/and bark," a spiritual world where "church is a swath of fog," and a startling world where an alligator stands "upright/outside my fourth floor window." As he did in previous collections, Lee Slonimsky proves he is one of the best poets writing in America today. You simply must read this book!
Katherine Hastings, author of Cloud Fire and Nighthawks, and Poet Laureate of Sonoma County, California
