Praise for Abandoned Earth, winner of the 17th Annual Gival Press Poetry Award, selected by Eric Nelson
“I love the clarity and precision of Linwood Rumney’s poems and his restrained yet intense voice. Intense because it is restrained, pressurized by his deft use of stanzaic structures and forms. Robert Frost and William Carlos Williams seem to be among his influences, but his voice and vision are clearly his own. Rumney writes about the natural world and the human world, and he sees in both of them a terrible excess and a brutal lack… Rumney’s poetry throughout this book—is resonant and complex in the most compelling way."
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—Eric Nelson, judge and author of Some Wonder: poems
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"The poems in Linwood Rumney’s Abandoned Earth record a life measured in seasons and the lifespans of dogs. Through a childhood practicing pitches with overripe fruit and leveling water pistols at the sun, to the loves and losses of adulthood, Rumney catalogues the wildness that still has a will. In this book, beauty persists like a love story, a desire you can’t seem to shake or unlearn.”
"In Abandoned Earth, Linwood Rumney creates a world both menacing and comforting at once. While wide-eyed with wonder at life’s sorrows, joys and mysteries, he maintains an understated tone that enables him to relate even the strangest events with a measured and convincing voice. This beautifully written collection contains what few books of poetry manage: high spirits, a keen eye and, above all, an embracing wisdom.”
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“This wonderful first collection reveals Rumney as a poet of great tonal and formal range. It wields a poetics hewn from dull jackknives, unpolished stones, and harsh northeastern winters—as luminous and dangerous as the ice that breaks branches with its weight. Yet it also traverses warmer climates, startling with wry odes and candid wit, transforming every object of the mundane into “a startling and unlikely jewel.”
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—Danielle Cadena Deulen, author of Our Emotions Get Carried Away from Us, winner of the Barrow Street Prize
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Samples Available Online
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[often in slightly different versions]
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photo by Jessica Rae Hahn
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