Kirjahaku

Winner of the 2011 qarrtsiluni chapbook contest, Kenneth Pobo's sensitive collection allows us an intimate entree into the woods and rural communities of northern Wisconsin, near Lake Superior, and through those places, into the poet's life and memories. In these deceptively simple poems, he and his partner search the woods for ladyslippers, listen to loons, and drink milkshakes in a local restaurant where the walls are lined with 45s. We, the readers, find ourselves drawn deeper and deeper into a world where both grief and the potential of loss coexist with a tender and bittersweet beauty.

In this 32 poem chapbook, Kenneth Pobo digs into memory and nature, the pulse of seasonal growth, age, decay, and whispers of mortality. Pobo's poems are complimented by the evocative full color digital artwork of Stacy Esch. The interplay of visual and poetic fuse direct observation with imagination and the subtle revelations of daily experience. Published by Spruce Alley Press

This book is divided into two sections, one that focuses on the interior world, life in a house or memories of life in various places, and one that focuses on the exterior world, particularly that of the garden. Both worlds blend. They are quite separate. The garden informs the narrator's interior life, and he also takes his interior life to the garden.Some of the poems reflect on mythological characters, who may be as vital and present as living characters. The plants themselves are like living characters, too. There is no strong split between the natural world and the human world. Perhaps we endanger ourselves when we insist on such a split. Animals, plants, writers (dead and alive), family, and where we live comingle.

This collection of poetry focuses on a gay man's battle against invisibility and keeping secrets. The poems reflect different times and parts of his life. His journey is partly to find a community but maybe more to find a sense of who he really is: a question that may transcend sexuality.

The poems in Kenneth Pobo's Loplop in a Red City spring from artworks old and new, figurative to abstract, Vincent Van Gogh to Leonora Carrington to Max Ernst. Like those works, the poems in Loplop are agonized and idyllic, uneasily at home in the surreal, animated, beautiful, and complex.Praise for Loplop in a Red City: These wonderful poems go way beyond mere ekphrasis. They're little masterpieces in their own right, bursting with exuberant life from the page and into our memories without our having to know anything about the paintings that inspired them. - Robert Cooperman, author of In the Colorado Gold Fever Mountains, winner of the Colorado Book Award for PoetryThere's no ego here; it's laid bare, without any ribbons or bows, and in that simplicity, somehow more complex than most.... Pobo's talents for finding the right words, his precision as an artist, sing from the canvas in this collection. - Jerrod Edson, author of The Moon Is RealLoplop in a Red City offers us a taste of super powers: Pobo's poems present lyrical, verbal play, and we also gain new insight into art, art history, and the painters who created the great works.... Pobo's poems will provide artistic companionship in the days and years ahead. - Marilyn Kallet, author of 17 books, including The Love That Moves MeThere are brilliant daubs of color here, moments where lyrical poems respond to art. Perhaps the concerns of painters are similar to those of poets: who am I, and what has this creative journey meant? - Patricia Clark, Professor and Poet in Residence at Grand Valley State University, author of My Father on a Bicycle and The Canopy

2021 Birdy Poetry Prize Finalist: More than a love story told in verse, Lilac and Sawdust examines two lives whose paths come together, finally, giving space for acceptance that wasn't always there, still isn't certainly taken for granted. Growing up, falling in love, aging as gracefully as the years allow . . . Jeff and Jerry are your neighbors, your friends, your family.

The poems included in the poetry collection reveal an impressive artistic perfection and creative energy. The poems are full of lyrical force and show freshness of style. No doubt, this is a significant work. The poems have great power of observation and originality of imagination.