Continent of Fire (Paperback or Softback)

Most poetry neglects the centrality of work in life. Not Continent of Fire, which begins with the steel mills of a Pittsburgh-area childhood. Its section headings are phrases from Paradise Lost, whose subject, the “Fall of Man,” is the mythical origin of human work. A terrible paradox emerges: We have to work to live, but much of our work is destroying the world and ourselves, everything "incidental to extraction." In the midst of this spreading fire, "We awaken again to what's been lost…before the fascists came." A Boy Scout rejects a rightwing scoutmaster around 1960. A city official watches social decay outside his Times Square office in the 1980s. We experience both the presentness and pastness of the past at the same time, a considerable feat. Such poems “seem a moment's thought," to quote Yeats' "Adam's Curse," while concealing the hard work.

— Michael Ruby, author of American Songbook

Sandburgian poems, turning the focus wheel of time — objectivist in their reportage, elemental in their desire to describe a life.

— Lee Ann Brown, author of Other Archer

Milton would be proud! William Considine’s poetry embraces time and marks it. Arrows aimed for the heart of art find a hearth here. Compassion is a constant companion, for a mate and for a planet. Lucid precision plays throughout these awareness engines, these levitational fields of moral torque. Fluent, mellifluous phrasings and pinpoint rhymes permeate the topical texture. What could be staid is alchemically turned into power: “Solid in our solitude as sated panthers.” Lunch, sex, warlords, and disasters yield rich discoveries with this wry Virgil guiding us through the “Restless laws of loss.”

— Jeffrey Cyphers Wright, author of Party Everywhere