Overview

In How to Draw Fire Marcus Whalbring includes four sections that move from childhood, to reflections of estrangement, to love and parenthood, and ends in a place of healing and affirmation. This collection appeals to lovers of different schools of poetry. Those who admire the confessional mode will be attracted to the vulnerability in poems that explore the sense of anxiety and loss as the poet explores the strained relationships with family members and writes of the dynamics of love and marriage and parenthood. Those who love surrealism and magical realism, will enjoy poems of whimsy that include a strange trip into an entire existence within a box and a poem about highlighter brought to a cemetery. In Marcus Whalbring's second collection of poems, he attempts to find common humanity and vulnerability by finding the threads that stitch together the memory and the dream, the world of childhood and the world of adulthood, the momentous and the everyday.

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9781646621354

Table of Contents

Reviews

How to Draw Fire is an achievement of imagination and surprise. This collection of poems approaches the familiar world from an offbeat angle that makes the exploration of childhood, love, marriage, parenthood, and mortality fresh and deeply understood. Whether in a cemetery with a yellow highlighter or living in a town that is contained within a box, Marcus Whalbring creates an honest, insightful, and complex voice that expresses strange and profound truths. These poems are driven by quirky logic that pulls the reader into a realm both physical and philosophical, where tenderness and loneliness are clear. Laura Van Prooyen With narrative that skates on narrative's edge, gilded with humor, honesty, and the strange, the poems of How to Draw Fire create domestic scenes of doubt, delight, and dismay, turn to suburbs of place and relation, and offer strands of disconnection and connection. Here Whalbring treads on the makings and markings of boyhood and manhood and brings the numinous as he teases the tensions of life and love into focus, gorgeously. Moving with familiarity as they query and reveal, the poems delight, become like rain sliding through smoke and diminishing fire familiar, uncanny, beautiful, and welcome. Hoa Nguyen

Author Information

Marcus Whalbring lives in southern Indiana with his wife and children. He earned his MFA from Miami University and his work has appeared in The Cortland Review, Spry, Underwood Press and others.

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