Author Biography

Max Garland's previous award winning books include The Word We Used for It, The Postal Confessions, and Hunger Wide as Heaven. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Michener Foundation, the Bush Foundation, and inclusion in Best American Short Stories, among many other awards. Born and raised in western Kentucky, where he worked for many years as a rural letter carrier on the route where he was born, he later attended the Iowa Writer's Workshop. He is currently Professor Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, and is a former Poet Laureate of Wisconsin. He lives in Eau Claire, Wisconsin.

Review

for Into the Good World Again: "'We gravitate toward water; from a sense of kinship," Max Garland's poem 'Bedrock' begins. Rivers, especially, lend these poems their current. People stand mid-bridge, in the here and now, staring upriver to learn what is coming, and downriver 'for what they thought was theirs to keep.' The "good world" is ever in motion, stilled only momentarily by these marvelous poems. Garland's grace-full meditations bring "the good world" back to us, his readers, too, despite the hardships of the pandemic, and the difficulties of loss. Marvelous imagery is everywhere, as here: dolphins "motion like sewing themselves in and out of the sea." These poems are deeply moving and nourishing. Garland speaks of a time 'before the holiness in things grew silent.' Yet his beautiful poems illustrate the opposite. Grace is right here in these pages, embedded in every line."--Connie Wanek, author of Rival Gardens: New and Selected Poems
"A new book from Max Garland is always a cause for celebration, and Into the Good World Again delivers all the pleasures that readers expect from this poet--vivid, evocative imagery, musical language, inventive metaphors, and original, striking observations. But these poems are also full of wisdom, something only poets of the first rank--of which Max Garland is one--provide. And the wisdom in this remarkable collection is hard-earned, deeply felt, and often profound."--Larry Watson, author of Montana 1948, Let Him Go, and other novels, and the poetry collection, Late Assignments

Review Quote

for The Postal Confessions--"Like the renegade exterminator in his poem 'The Termite Confessions,' Max Garland allows his allegiances to stray to those mortal hungers that undermine the foundations of certainty. Out of such sympathies and a great gift for making poetry out of plain speech, a place and its history are given a voice and a visible soul. Unlike the lonely God of the Sistine Chapel in his last poem, Garland reaches across the space between our lives to touch us, and he succeeds."--Eleanor Wilnerfor Hunger Wide As Heaven:"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." - Naomi Shihab Nye"Max Garland finds, in the 'knottiness/ of things'--wind, tree, bird, sky, water, lights, 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."--Ronald Wallacefor The Word We Used For It:"Somewhere between the joyous ecstasies of Rumi and the sweet and sometimes doleful observations of Whitman, there's a spot on the continuum of poetry where Max Garland sits and says his luscious, witty, remarkable poems. He gives us the it at the heart of existence, which for all but the finest of artists is all-too-often-unreachable."--Robert Wrigley"Each poem is a gift of seeing, a gift of reflection, a mirror for the holy. We, as readers, get to taste what language can do when it melts into our tongues, flavors our lives."--Kao Kalia Yang"Max Garland's long-limbed, resonant poems move with an understated grace that belies their tensile strength. They beg to be read aloud. Accessible, finely intelligent, laced with good humor, his third and best collection yet moves unerringly on 'the edge of joy/where it sharpens itself for the work it has to do.'"--David Graham

Excerpt from Book

Social Distancing Say there came a pandemic; some newsdrunk virusset its hooks in us. And only the sky for a nurse, arced and empty and barely even blue.And only the musical pulse, and the several senses for consolation, except for a stream of distant words like waves bearing the rush, curl, and foam of elsewherearriving, the distant rhythm of others to bridge the gapbetween head and heart, dark and day, fear, and whatever it is one feels on the brink ofwhen walking next to great waters, how the surf catches and releases the light, and the waves and bones tremble like the distant cousins of constant thunder. We know salt tumbles eventually from ocean to body and back, and forth. We know it takes ages to regather the shaken self into the good world again. I remember a ritual once where hundreds of tiny basket-like boats were lit and launched with prayers and flowers and misfortunes, ignited and cast out on the water until the bay was ablaze, a rocking constellation of human woe uttered in small tonguesof flame, until little by little they drifted, burned,blinked out, and then it was just dark water again,and we all went home. Did our troubles never return? Were we really less burdened, or better people? What I mean is sometimes worry needs to be ignited,launched into words, if only to blaze awhile amongflotillas of sorrows we thought were ours alone. What I really mean, of course, is Keep in touch. Even if you don''t know what to say, especially if you don''t know what to say. Kind words,fellow castaways, mind-lit emergencies of fingertip and tongue, float this festival of downtime and distance,repopulate the dark with your fledgling human light. The LoversIt rained all night and part of tomorrow.Things that hadn''t happened yetwere already wet outside the windows, leaking into the mind-- soft fallof the sound of rain on the shinglesand maples and feathers of the mother-birdsin the hedges. It rained the loverstoward knowing they would meet. Rained the brand new streets silver in the gutters, sent the river twisting like everywhere was in it wanting out. The air was faintly mineral, iron or pyrite on the tongue, the lovers thought.Each would know the taste of the otherwhen the time came, as if remembered,though neither would remember the rainwhich was everything to them. ExilesEven the zebra mussels who lie here in ruins carved clean, bleached and rattling in the sand and subtle music of foam, encrusting the driftwood, even these unloved thumbnails bear their deaths well in the sun, shorn of whatever nerve and appetite they harbored, having clung so tightly to sift their lives from shallow water. Even the misplaced, exiles borne in ballast, on bow lines, waterweeds and bilge,claim their foothold in time. Even invaders, cloggers and corroders, crowding out the local, even the reviled break down under foot, under time, under wave. Sooner or later you can''t tell the stranded from the strand. Sooner or later sand and grit gather us up, the mussels and me. Bone and shell and splintered wood and even ground-downglass beatified, tumbled time and time again through the gates of the green waves until even the broken bottle, mindlessly thrown, assumes the rounded shape of the shining world. Carbon -In a dream I saw a table where all the elements fell into place... -Dmitri Mendeleev You think the elements know the difference between the inanimate and us? And what is the difference, really, between a rock and the hard place the human heart becomes, at times? Does carbon, for instance, care if it abides in coal or bone, pencil tip, French kiss, redwood, deadwood, double martini, or diamond?Chimney smoke? Mortal breath?Do the elements ever miss, like a hometown, the star of their nativity? Like a manger? Like we all miss old flames?Do atoms harbor the memory of immaculate heat, the way I remember the warmth and rocking of a mother? Or imagine I do?Is it accurate to call the outer shell of the carbon atom, where the latches of the compounds click, welcoming? Or just needy? Or merely tolerant of the prodigal electronsof hydrogen, oxygen, all the other lost lambs.Wandering atoms scratching at the door like strays you let in for the night, who curl at the hearth and never leave.Or tiny exiled gods in their sparse garments of motion.If the elements first flowered outward like children blow the crowns of dandelions into wishful scatter and drift, did we become, eventually, their wish come true? So far? Or false?When the neurons first fired, and thought leapt the synapses of our separate skulls--was it chemistry or mythology;evolution or intuition-- that first inking of self,like some elemental lamp rubbing itself awake? If metaphor is the radiant half-life of an ever-opening mind, imagine this--you''ve been driving all night, through night, beyond night, drawn by loneliness, or inertia, or gravity.There is no boredom greater than yours.And suddenly you see, or think you see something flicker, like the sputtering Vacancy sign of an old motel. Say carbon is that old motel. One of the early roadside chains. Carbon 12, let''s call it, with two inner rooms always occupied, and four outer rooms, occasionally, briefly vacant.And the rooms are time worn, but tidy, the retro curtains flimsy as ash, and the owner is absent, but too stubborn to sell, and you''ve been traveling, dear wanderer, dear atom, literally forever...Remember that poem by Frost? The farmer sayshome is the place where when you have to go there,they have to take you in? But his wife says no, it''s more like something you somehow haven''t to deserve.Imagine the carbon atom as that vintage motel, wherewhen you have to go there they have to take you in.It''s not a matter of deserve. Lodge anywhere long enough and it starts to feel like home, as every immigrant atom in your body knows.Mendeleev said he dreamed the order of the elements.It''s hard to know for sure. But I do know the right sleep can take years to fall into-- blind alleys, obsessions, outmoded maps, wrong roads, before the mind stalls at the limits of logic, and steps out over the edge for the deep-dive into the sub-structures and spell-bindings. Before the right dream turns darkness inside out, and you see, or think you see, something flicker, Vacancy reconfigured into what, for lack of a better term, we call here and now-- --coal or bone, pencil tip, French kiss, redwood, deadwood, double martini, or diamond. Such is the ruse of the material. Chimney smoke, mortal breath, brief as the distance between darkness and wonder.

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