HUNGER WIDE AS HEAVEN
By Max Garland

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Review by Naomi Shihab Nye:
"I’m a mad fan of the delicious, radiant poems of Max Garland. He even makes me feel closer to that old-time religion than I’ve felt in quite a while. There’s a welcoming world here you’ll recognize, as well as a wistfulness that feels perfectly pitched, leaning out to mystery. You can string his poems together in your mind, drape them from the door inside your head like a welcoming wreath, and you’ll feel better walking through it."

Review by Eleanor Wilner:
"Kentucky bred, fed from “the faint blue source” of dawning TV in “the waning days of Methodism” — for grassroots American melancholy, Max Garland is the pure tobacco: free of poetic fashions, the wind in the linden his muse, surprised by the light that has traveled so far to find his transparent self on the dark glass of a hotel window, “a man still / in the midst of transmission,” through which our transient world can be seen."

Review by Ronald Wallace:
"Max Garland finds, in “the knottiness / of things” — wind, tree, bird, sky, water, light, a father’s milk truck, a mother’s perfume — a music of resilience and grace. Simultaneously elegy and celebration, these poems explore themes of time and mortality, God and faith, memory and redemption, with a meditative serenity and urgency, in an affectionate accessible voice. For Garland, poetry is “a way to speak a loss away,” to embrace, in emptiness, strength; in diminishment, desire; in loss, recovery; in hunger wide as heaven, the possibility, at least, of fulfillment. This is a beautiful, beautiful book."