Overview

Winner of the 2025 Blue Light Book Award Praise for Everything: New and Selected Poems Terry Lucas is the author of two prize-winning chapbooks, If They Have Ears to Hear (Southeast Missouri State University Press, 2012) and Altar Call (San Gabriel Valley Literary Festival, 2013), in addition to three previous full-length collections: In This Room (CW Books, 2016), Dharma Rain (Saint Julian Press, 2016), and with photographer Gary Topper, The Thing Itself (Longship Press, 2020). His poetry has appeared in numerous national journals, including Alaska Quarterly Review, Best New Poets, and The Sun. Terry is Poet Laureate Emeritus of Marin County California and a freelance poetry coach at www.terrylucas.com. In this moving and profoundly cohesive selection from his lifetime of poems, Terry Lucas tells us that ""everything yes everything now gathered to us is leaving.""Yet Lucas provides us with intense presence, whether he is writing about the boy he was - child of difficult parents, and so God-haunted that he became a boy preacher - or about the grown man who traverses, for work and for love, a keenly seen America. His work is enriched by his dialogue with other poets; many of these poems are afterpoems, some of them quite directly engaging with previous poetic texts. From his earliest poems to the new work that is this book's destination, Lucas' poetry is unified by a commitment to the urgencies of character, place, memory, language, and voice. Terry Lucas gives us a map of the road he's traveled, with ""each switchback demanding full attention/in the moonless night."" - David Groff, author of Live in Suspense

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9781421835730

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Winner of the 2025 Blue Light Book AwardPraise for Everything: New and Selected PoemsIn this moving and profoundly cohesive selection from his lifetime of poems, Terry Lucas tells us that ""everything yes everything now gathered to us is leaving.""Yet Lucas provides us with intense presence, whether he is writing about the boy he was - child of difficult parents, and so God-haunted that he became a boy preacher - or about the grown man who traverses, for work and for love, a keenly seen America. His work is enriched by his dialogue with other poets; many of these poems are afterpoems, some of them quite directly engaging with previous poetic texts. From his earliest poems to the new work that is this book's destination, Lucas' poetry is unified by a commitment to the urgencies of character, place, memory, language, and voice. Terry Lucas gives us a map of the road he's traveled, with ""each switchback demanding full attention/in the moonless night."" - David Groff, author of Live in Suspense The poems collected in Terry Lucas' Everything: New and Selected are driven by a deep sympathy for our common human struggle. Representing poems written over several decades, this collection comprises a meditation on survival. Yet however somber the subject, these poems are buoyed by Lucas' wry humor. In ""Safeway,"" he claims, ""I love my grocery store. I love to roam / its aisles - Keebler Elves, the Jolly Green Giant // shuffling for position with jellied Spam..."" It's hard not to smile when in ""Phaseolus Lunatis"" the poet's mother requests the mushy green beans she's convinced will poison her. A profound record of our efforts just to get by, Lucas' poetry ultimately reassures us that ""we all eventually stumble into our own story.""- Joan Baranow, author of Reading Szymborska in a Time of PlagueIn meticulous and prayerful poems that survey the ""unlucky wreckage"" of our lives, that measure the distance between the ""mitochondria in my brain"" and a ""gold-plated phonograph record... coursing / through interstellar space,"" Terry Lucas gathers the everything of the book's title toward a relentless reckoning with faith and desire: ""O fog of morning, / hover in the hollows of this day, / linger in low places, to rise up again / when we need not more, but less."" These poems acknowledge the fleetingness of ""everything yes everything now"" but offer evidence of an abiding spirit, ""the universe become conscious,"" which resides within us and compels us to create.- Michael Waters, author of Pagan Sky: New & Selected Poems 2000-2025

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