Pre-order Love & Fear, the new collection by Henry G. Stanton.
6.5 X 6.5
53 pages
Advanced praise for Love & Fear:
Once again, Henry Stanton has taken the stand and provided brilliant, unerring testimony. His latest poetry book, Love and Fear, pulls back the skin on the autonomic nervous system and exposes the instincts and intuitions that define and isolate us. You don’t read this book. You imbibe - with vampire hunger - the freshly oxygenated blood moving from the lungs to the heart. Pagan stones fall as do all shibboleths of webmaster human. Only love and work and self-erasure counterpoint loss and these, oftentimes, with grim caveats, as in the poem, Grief: “Love the big female Great Horned Owl… goes with collapsed you now… your perfectly picked spine… left behind… with me.” Oh, my. This collection of poetry will bring you to your knees.
-Dean Gessie, winner of the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award for Poetry in England, the UN-aligned Poetry Competition in Finland, the COP26 Poetry Competition in Scotland, and twice selected for The Best 64 Poets by Black Mountain Press in North Carolina.
The experience of reading Love & Fear is like walking outside on a summer day when a thunderstorm suddenly pounces, at once terrifying and quenching the soul. This new collection by poet Henry Stanton unfurls a stunning tapestry, though frayed and torn, of human emotions unraveling to their rawest, with each poem turning on a singular axis of agony and delight. Stanton’s oracular vision both disturbs and invites us to leave the familiar trail for a new one he has made. “Have faith and pursue the unknown end,” he says, “a black, gurgling stream”. “To act as though you never heard the threats and climb slowly down from // your self.” This book is a wonder.
-David Beaudouin, poet
In this remarkable, visionary poem cycle, Henry Stanton takes the reader along for a deep dive into language, life, the terrors of love and death, loneliness, lust, the elemental joists which bear the awful and happy weight of being human, of simply being a creature of blood and muscle on this ephemeral shared ground we all attempt, day-by-day to know. These poems are concussion devices which reward careful and repeated readings. Enter gladly, friend, and be blessed. This is poetry to eat, the way one eats a thick and bloody steak, and is just as nourishing. It is delicious.
-Jeff Weddle, Alabama Beat Poet Laureate and author of Letter to Xhevdet Bajraj
I am always blown backward by the intensity and force of Henry Stanton’s poetry—not only the places he’s willing to go, but how he gets there. Though Love & Fear arrives as a meditation on the inherently abstract realm of emotion—not only love and fear, but also anger, frustration, compassion, and even boredom—the project is inherently poetic in its attempt to render those abstract states of being with visceral concrete detail drawn from the intersection of the wild and the domestic. In the wonderful, “Desire,” for example, he writes of “that innocent and gay / night of pelting rain stream of fast cars. / A fawn faltered at the roadside the doe had crossed. / Taking the same way back, the fawn lay crumpled.” Stanton’s poetry communicates a world where there is always an edge that beckons, always a risk we must take as we move forward, even when moving forward may require the courage of stepping past the carcasses and minefields of our fear, grief, and loss. But there is always momentum of language and intent, pushing us forward, so when, in the penultimate poem, Stanton writes “come back with me back with me my darling / come here here here! / hold my hand” his words land like a call to action, a leaping forward past despair into an intimacy that makes the “Joy” of its title feel well-earned and well-deserved. This is a delightfully restless collection full of energy and drive. I am thankful for it.
-Joel Peckham, Author of Gone the Sun, and Any Moonwalker Can Tell You: new and selected poems.