Chris Ransick

mummer: a person acting in a masked mime prisoner: a person trapped by a set of circumstances scavenger: a person who collects abandoned items thief: a person who takes things by stealth, without force or violence This collection begins in the realm of the mummer whose masked performance conceals the self and transforms language to better evoke what is too risky to speak overtly. Ransick's poems ply this tension between knowing and speaking in cadence and imagery that simultaneously disorients readers and beckons them forward, in lines whose half-remembered music refuses to be predictable. The role of the shunned figures in the title is to draw poems out from the margins of experience, to reclaim voices muted by more powerful forces, an elusive goal only the best poetry can accomplish. Travel along with them as guides, ready to steal and scavenge what you need for your own escape.

This collection pulses with surprising turns and playful language. The complex weave of individual, highly readable pieces presents an invitation to the reader to absorb the book as greater than the sum of its parts. Personal and intimate, the words reach out and evoke the constraints of modern life soaring above them to reveal fissures of experience and perception where mysteries and wonder exist which may be considered, at a glance, merely ordinary.

Chris Ransick, appointed Denver Poet Laureate in 2006, is the author of five books: Language for the Living and the Dead; Never Summer: Poems from Thin Air (Winner of the Colorado Book Award); A Return to Emptiness: Stories (Colorado Book Award finalist); Lost Songs & Last Chances; and Asleep Beneath the Hill of Dreams.

Winner of the Colorado Book Award, Never Summer speaks tenderly...layered so the perception of reality becomes almost super-real. This book is an everyday world where tragedy and bad news occasionally intrude. So does an ironic humor. Through all the ups and downs, there is a thread of confidence in the future, the belief that "we will build a lasting home."

The voice of these poems lives in myth and dream, and therefore holds the secrets of our deepest hopes and desires. Ransick knows how to beautifully turn a line, forging music and image into moments masterfully crafted-moments that contain the high and low, bird wing and cloud, screwballs and mud. These poems haunt, humor, and cajole, while moving the reader to higher ground. They lift the reader up and give her a new perspective on what it is to be human.

A Colorado Book Award finalist, A Return to Emptiness is a collection of short stories about life, loss, and love. In Ransick's words, "Loss is common to us all, yet multifarious in individual experience. I wrote these stories not primarily to describe loss but to circumscribe it--which is to say that I drew a circle of narratives round the experience to both locate and limit it. I was vaguely aware of this at the time of the writing. It's quite clear now. "Nobody gets out of this life without experiencing loss, as well as what is offered in recompense to those with the humility and quietude to accept emptiness. Stories are an ancient way of communicating experience and a collection of short fiction is a unique and complex symbol set that can, in the best cases, fill a void, turn loss to gain. If I had my way, this book would do that for the reader."