Before heaven will suffice, I go listening for a word,
Its oily meat, its newborn orbit. Come with me, now.
—From "Inside Hell's Kitchen"
As the son of a sailor who grew up on Lake Erie, J.P. White is given to sudden violent storms and rough water that test and shape a man's grasp on the living. No matter how far his poems travel—Russia, Bermuda, Italy, the Dominican Republic, Germany, Mexico, France, New York City, Africa—water is never far from the elemental current that feeds them. As such, his poems are brightly lit with a searching out of islands, distant cities, and those thin places where the truth of our wounds and our wonder shine through.
The new poems in
All Good Water
speak convincingly about the death of friends and family, the renewal of marriage, lost shoes, abandoned children, and failed boats, as well as larger troubles in the torn fabric of America and our historic obsessions with expansion and blood purity.
In the last thirty-five years,
J.P. White
has published essays, articles, fiction, reviews, interviews, and poetry in over a hundred publications, including
The Nation
,
The New Republic
, the
Los Angeles Times Magazine
The Gettysburg Review
The American Poetry Review
, and
Poetry
. He is a graduate of New College in Sarasota, Florida; Colorado State University; and the Vermont College of Fine Arts. He is the author of four books of poems and the novel
Every Boat Turns South
.