The Rock That is Not a Rabbit

He has the perception, and indeed the craftsmanship, to construct a scene, to highlight a moment, with just enough detail—a delicately wrought image here, a telling phrase there—to draw you in, to put you in the picture.

* Colorado Review *

The otherness of the natural world shimmers into view, into consciousness, and so does the city that encroaches upon it, in Corey Marks’s bold, Stevensian, textured memories and meditations. This full-bodied book is an enlargement of experience.

-- Edward Hirsch, author of The Heart of American Poetry

What a strange and unexpected book Corey Marks has written, a book in which thinking allows the poem to approach real and genuine feeling. How gently it refreshes our perceptions of reality, reminding us of the loneliness of the imagination in an uncanny, but human-scale, poem like ‘Horse Headed Boy.’ With a deceptively plain style that branches into introspection as dense as a wood, the poet registers the consequences of silence, personal and cultural, the endless and terrifying sublime of ‘the warren / of what I hadn’t said.’ This is a meditative book, a book in which a kind of concentrated thinking can feel light as snow as it buries you with implication. It conjures up a world of American houses in which no one has the courage to say what needs to be said, American landscapes in which we go to figure out what those things are, and finally, American thresholds in which some measure of honesty might eventually be (painfully and beautifully) possible.

-- Katie Peterson, author of Life in a F