Overview

Anchored by the first years of the Covid-19 pandemic, Kevin A. Risner's debut full-length poetry collection It's Easy to Lose Your Breath is both introspective and outward-facing, rippling from the poet's inner life into family and friendships, work and unemployment, suburban life, and wildlife. The collection draws on daydreams and nightmares, small animals' housecalls, and memories of childhood. Concerns about health and emotional well-being intermingle with the worries about what climate change will bring in a world hellbent on maintaining the capitalist status quo. Though not without that unbeatable Rust Belt hope, this is a collection that sits with the heavy weight of what the powers that be have done to the natural world and what it might take for ordinary people to survive in the years and decades to come.

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9781966253235

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Reviews

""It's Easy to Lose Your Breath reflects on our collective quarantine year with a burgeoning hope in the face of dread's drumbeat. It's no surprise that Kevin A. Risner's poems snap with a pulse from The National because both yearn for what could be (or for what could've been) amid bedraggled reality. 'I'm the only human who weeps for this lone songbird, ' Risner writes, but his poetry connects us. We all feel, and weep, with Risner through his poems. With our hearts on our sleeves, we struggle as one with '[t]he knowledge that I can try my best and I might still fail.' The year 2020 separated us, but It's Easy to Lose Your Breath brings us together."" - Mitchell Nobis, author of The Size of the Horizon, or, I Explained Everything to the Trees ""While most might shy away from the trauma of isolation and grief during the Covid pandemic, Kevin A. Risner's poignant collection, It's Easy to Lose Your Breath, dares to look unflinchingly at our collective loss. These poems evoke the tenderness and whimsy in our altered lives while holding close to the love and friendship that helped us through. This is a beautiful collection and a necessary reminder of the poetry we share in spite of the pain drawn with every breath."" - Jared Beloff, author of Who Will Cradle Your Head

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