Proverbs of Earth - Softcover

Newman, Lance

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1963908570 ISBN 13: 9781963908572

Publisher: Spuyten Duyvil Publishing, 2025

Synopsis

As I read Lance Newman’s proverbial poems, a fragile cabin of existential questions built itself in my mind: “What / follows from what I know?” “Am I equal to / the awakened life?” These beautiful Thoreauvian meditations are remedy to the “machines of doubt” our time’s getters and spenders have placed like bombs in the palms of our hands.
Jennifer Moxley

“Truth is as constant as work,” Lance Newman says in one of his Proverbs of Earth—and only so constant, I think as I read the poems, impersonal in their first-person and often gnomic voice. This is a book I carry with me, pick up and lay down and pick up again, interested in the rhythm of breath and the stripped-down statement—or, on another reading, that I follow all the way through its meditations on weather, deep time and domesticity (the same, the poems tell me), the work of books, the growing and taking of food, the body as its own animal, money. I don’t know until later that the poems have made an argument, a compelling one, about how to live.
Katharine Coles

Proverbs of Earth is Lance Newman’s hand-made mix tape of Walden: a deep dive into language with fresh takes on some very American ideas. These poems give us a cigarette break from capitalism, helping us think in a place and time that just wants us distracted and a little pissed off. Lines and sentences in these quiet protest poems can feel like Jenny Holzer’s truisms: “One life is a snare/and one a winter cottage”; “I try to be content/but I’d rather preach fire”; “I learned/better than to mortgage/my work to a broker’s taste”; “What if we refused/to burn dollars for fuel?” “Am I equal to/an awakened life?” Proverbs of Earth is a Magic 8-Ball, a Thoreauvian oracle.
Jill McDonough

The true experiment of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden may be how it offers itself to continued experimentation. In Proverbs of Earth, through a two-year process of disassembling and reassembling Thoreau’s language, Lance Newman affirms Walden’s enduring values for a deeply lived life amid the chaos of 21st-century capitalism. In the New West and a century plus later, Newman faces the “harlequin art of poetry” that “serves up quaint routines of acid and fire” to configure beautifully resonant and humble “broken proverbs” that extend Thoreau’s quest to find transformation between a content life and a life of “fire.”
Marcella Durand

Lance Newman’s Proverbs of Earth speak from a crossroads where the past meets the future in an unrealized present in which much is at stake. In these sometimes direct, sometimes oblique, always tight and understated constructions of insight and implication, a historically-rich reverence for the physical earth ties directly into contemporary ironies and dangers. Rather than violating their surroundings through new stages of turmoil indifferent to anything but itself, the poems and their tentative wisdom explore the all-too-human problem of how to create, and recreate, a consciousness that might be connected to the world in which it finds itself. These are proverbs for right now, and we need them.
Mark Wallace

In Proverbs of Earth, Lance Newman squeezes fresh insights from a vaunted lexicon, itself deliberately alive. Read as a whole, these “cellared words” explore Thoreau’s themes from new and artful angles: our fraught systems of labor, tensions between humans and nature, time’s irrepressible tide. But the true pleasure of Newman’s collection is encountering its jewel-like poems as meditations whose wisdom accrues. These pieces turn artfully and unexpectedly—masterfully couple sound and sense—and remind us that we, like “all animals / combust for a time”.
John Miller

About this title

About the Author

Lance Newman's poems have appeared in many print and web magazines in the US, UK, and Australia. He has published three chapbooks: Come Kanab (Dusie, 2007), 3by3by3 (Beard of Bees, 2010), and Satellite View (Finishing Line, 2025). Proverbs of Earth is his first full-length collection. Newman teaches literature, media, and writing at Westminster University in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Edition details

• Publisher: Spuyten Duyvil Publishing
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1963908570
• ISBN 13: 9781963908572
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 80