Kingfisher Blues

Like everything Erik Reece writes, Kingfisher Blues is both beautiful and important. Honest and precise, often harrowing and always revelatory, these poems showcase a writer at the top of his form.

~Silas House, author of Southernmost

Myth is the bedfellow of truth, and Erik Reece draws from Greek lore, jazz, Chinese poets, and his American walking companion Henry David Thoreau. But it's the poet's own desperate story about addiction's destruction of life that rewrites the worlds of gods and humans. At times brilliantly surreal and at other times stripped so bare we can see the skeleton of the man writing, Reece sings a blues that's brutal and deeply moving, that reveals why some of us want to "shed this skin and dive into the dark forgetfulness." When I witnessed the poet restring his upright bass with barbed wire, I was certain for the first time in a long while that artifice matters, that poetry might make something of use.

~Todd Davis, author of Ditch Memory: New and Selected Poems

Kingfisher Blues is a searingly honest and stark account of life as an addict, with all the damage that life causes. This book, however, is not uniformly dark. Amid the brute and terrifying glimpses of Reece's own degraded façade, and the great cost of its maintenance, there is kindness, grace, and even humor. Kingfisher Blues is important, both because of its accomplishments as poetry, and because it speaks so directly and hopefully to one of the besetting ills of our current moment.

~Jeffrey Skinner, author of Sober Ghost