Time Is Always Now: Poems
About this ebook
<p><strong>PRAISE FOR <em>TIME IS ALWAYS NOW</em></strong></p>
<p>Drawing from sources as wide-ranging as Emily Dickinson, <em>Apocalypse Now</em>, fairy tales, and social media, Rebecca Starks’s <em>Time Is Always Now</em> deftly balances intelligence and pathos, resisting easy dichotomies and judgments. As these fine poems insist, the present is relentless, and we are immersed: “No, not out of time; helplessly in it.” Ours is a country of guns; ours is a “middle-aged earth” in decline—and yet, we are here, witnessing, questioning. I am grateful for Starks’s voice in the present moment, and I’m grateful to have her poems to carry with me into the future, whatever it may bring.<br>
  —Maggie Smith, author of <em>Good Bones</em></p>
<p>Rebecca Starks writes with a sense that time can be stopped in a poem, lives suspended and drawn inward, even in the most aimless moments. There’s a wonderful clarity to <em>Time Is Always Now</em>, an electricity that feels bright and wild. It’s to be found in the roadsides and a robin’s “clutch,” in the retina that “registers pain,” in the sky at dusk and the “months of mud.” I greet these poems with so much enthusiasm—these poems that crave, clarify, and propose sublime ways to become refreshed in our most confused times.<br>
  —David Biespiel (from the foreword), author of <em>Republic Café</em></p>
<p>At one point, Rebecca Starks describes a winter hike, in which she crosses “sociable mouse hops, two feet together” and passes “a squirrel’s scramble at the base of a tree,/ then the bunched landings of a mustelid bound/ from the yawn under one log to another.” Several of her wonderful book’s qualities are evidenced here. If too many poets, in their ignorance, regard nature as a mere repository of metaphor, Starks, like Frost, is both knowledgeable and uncannily <em>accurate</em> about it. (“Yawn” is the perfect word, say, in this passage.) Her sinuous and heavily subordinated syntax is also suggestive of a mind with great range—geographical, thematic, and prosodic—though she can also, as, for instance, in “American Flag,” move by a cunning terseness.<br>
  —Sydney Lea, author of <em>The Music of What Happens: Lyric and Everyday Life</em></p>
<p><strong>ABOUT THE AUTHOR:</strong></p>
<p>Rebecca Starks grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, earned a BA in English from Yale University and a PhD in English from Stanford University, and works as a freelance editor and as a teacher for the Osher Institute of Lifelong Learning program at the University of Vermont. Her poems and short fiction have appeared in <em>Baltimore Review, Ocean State Review, Slice Literary, Crab Orchard Review, Tahoma Literary Review</em>, and elsewhere. Winner of <em>Rattle</em>’s 2018 Neil Postman Award for Metaphor and past winner of <em>Poetry Northwest</em>’s Richard Hugo Prize, she is the founding editor-in-chief of <em>Mud Season Review</em> and a former director of the Burlington Writers Workshop. She and her family live in a log cabin in the woods of Richmond, Vermont.</p>
About the author
<p>Rebecca Starks grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, earned a BA in English from Yale University and a PhD in English from Stanford University, and works as a freelance editor and as a teacher for the Osher Institute of Lifelong Learning program at the University of Vermont. Her poems and short fiction have appeared in <em>Baltimore Review, Ocean State Review, Slice Literary, Crab Orchard Review, Tahoma Literary Review</em>, and elsewhere. Winner of <em>Rattle</em>’s 2018 Neil Postman Award for Metaphor and past winner of <em>Poetry Northwest</em>’s Richard Hugo Prize, she is the founding editor-in-chief of <em>Mud Season Review</em> and a former director of the Burlington Writers Workshop. She and her family live in a log cabin in the woods of Richmond, Vermont.</p>
