The Blue in the Eye of the Girl from La Jolla (Paperback)

Eric Linder has been writing poems for more than forty years.

In his first full-length collection his insight, humor, and precise lines combine to make poems that you will want to go back to time and again.

With a clear eye and open heart, he gets to the nub of situations, personalities, and life’s puzzles, laying out the absurdities and sublime moments common to all of us.

His work has appeared in The Quarterly, Harvard Magazine, and Light Year: The Annual of Light Verse and Funny Poems.

He lives in Eastham on Cape Cod and recently discovered a meteorite in his back yard while digging turnips.

"With graciousness and brevity, Eric Linder’s poems paint images elegant in their tautness and rich in complex observation. Like an unconventional spy he rejects stealth but prefers to lurk openly in order to seize the moment and capture it with his snare of words—before it escapes and evaporates into the general population never to be seen again. His are poems of remarkable clarity, richness, and a confident wit that is more than content to fly under the radar.”
—Bob Staake, best-selling author and New Yorker cover artist

“I heard a famous poet read at Rosary Hill College in Buffalo, and he related how horrible an ordeal it is to write one of his poems. I believe here the opposite is true in the work of Eric Linder. Congratulations to him for this collection. I have admired his work for years, and it is clear that he enjoyed writing the poems, and the joy of that is many times repeated, manifested in the reading of them. It is something rare for me that I was sorry to see the book’s end, and peremptorily I can say it. “I read a lot of quite wonderful poetry, and this is the best book of poems I’ve read in twenty years.”
—Michael Casey, author of There It Is: New & Selected Poems and past winner of the Yale Younger Poets prize for his book Obscenities

Eric Linder received his BA from the University of Evansville in Evansville, Indiana. After working briefly in New York City in advertising, he moved to Chelmsford, Mass., where he owned The Chelmsford Bookstore for five years. He has owned and operated Yellow Umbrella Books in Chatham, Mass., on Cape Cod since 1980. He has performed his work in Boston; Lowell; and Andover, Mass; Chelan, Wash.; and on Cape Cod at various venues including Night of New Works at the Academy Playhouse in Orleans and the Cape Cod Cultural Center in Dennisport. He lives in Eastham where he recently discovered a meteorite in his back yard while digging turnips. His work has appeared in The Quarterly, Harvard Magazine, Light Year: The Annual of Light Verse and Funny Poems, Bellingham Review, and other journals and anthologies.