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