"Among cornfields, junkyards, and a Dairy Queen, the eclectic cast
of Rustin Larson's Lost Letters and Windfalls marches across a rural
stage: an old woman small 'like a burlap bag/ full of nylons, ' family
members, angels, finches, the wind, the muse, and a young girl in a
Degas painting. The poet asserts: 'The light falls upon all things. I
have/ my memory of you--quiet as a/ picture frame among all these
broken houses.' In poem after poem, Larson captures images firmly
cast in time yet eternal--even slightly holy: 'But here's what we are:
each man, each woman, / each neuter object, a church.'"
"'Listen, ' Larson urges, 'the world/ begins in a moment.' The
moments described in these poems are painterly and vivid. The poet
trusts only his 'sense of touch.' They conjure a world of isolated
stillness where characters can 'choose to stand outside of ourselves
if we wish, the snow falling.' But also a world of connection where
'planets are fishing/ for us, wanting/ us' and '[t]he moon is the
friend of the earth / and the earth of the sun.' This is a book of small
tendernesses and lightning bolts that will stay with you."
Rustin Larson's poetry has appeared in The
New Yorker, The Iowa Review, and North
American Review. He won 1st Editor's
Prize from Rhino and was a prize winner in
The National Poet Hunt and The Chester
H. Jones Foundation contests. A graduate
of the Vermont College MFA in Writing,
Larson was an Iowa Poet at The Des Moines National Poetry
Festival, and a featured poet at the Poetry at Round Top Festival.
He is a poetry professor at Maharishi University, a writing instructor
at Kirkwood Community College, and has also been a
writing instructor at Indian Hills Community College.
His honors and awards also include Pushcart Prize Nominee
(seven times, 1988-2010); featured writer, DMACC Celebration
of the Literary Arts, 2007, 2008; and finalist, New England
Review Narrative Poetry Competition, 1985.
About the Author Rustin Larson's fiction has appeared in Delmarva Review, Wapsipinicon Almanac, Tower Journal, and The Iowa Source. His poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, Iowa Review, North American Review, The Penn Review and Poetry East. He is the author of Bum Cantos (Blue Light Press), The Philosopher Savant (Glass Lyre Press) and Pavement, winner of the Blue Light Poetry Prize for 2016. Praise for Rustin Larson In "The Philosopher Savant Crosses the River," Rustin Larson now winds his words several notches closer to a phantom sense of the certainties we once thought we could assume - the way life promised a few solid things, perhaps "the purpose of life," which now seems sold door to door as "an abrupt change," if anything. Words in their ordinary sense have been released from those customary connections, and often seem spoken from a place of floating far below meaning's surface, as if a sedimentia abounding in the reasoning of tea leaves or some other structure of correspondence beyond our normal grasp were sending messages to the surface of the page. And yet we are inclined to wholly accept their truths, given who the sayer is. Even adrift on this raft of free-floating words, the voice, the tone, the presence of Rustin Larson is moored in every line - the dark humor, the human suffering and human song, the impingement of childhood memories, the direct gaze at the sane absurdity of the world, have only gained ground. "Philip Glass articulates / our brains in music," he says, and with a craft of impeccable syntax that holds onto the same roots as Bishop's or Larkin's, he, too, articulates those deeply patterned structures that give us hope and keep us here, reading on. - Audrey Bohanan
