Continuo

Fugues, canons, songs, villanelles, the music of the spheres and the music of the heart—Danny Rendleman’s Continuo is a symphony of experience. From a magically commonplace Midwest where the suburbs offer hints of mortality, secrets of the soul reside in nasturtium blooms, and miraculous love hides in a bowl of fruit, the book offers surprises and delights at every turn. Plumbing deep truths lying in and behind everyday objects and events, the poems offer riches of language and observation in his most profound—and profoundly entertaining—volume yet.
—Tom Foster, author of Seamus Heaney
These poems use the word “sorrow” and they mean it: they are lyrical about hard lives and hard labor, the way we “make do with what we get.” What is remarkable about them is their compassion and tenderness, their ability to look at the unforgiving nature of our contemporary urban lives and stay sane, calm, and beautifully truthful.
—Charles Baxter, author of The Feast of Love and Gryphon, in praise of The Middle West
Rendleman’s poems tell us that light cannot be found without embracing the darkness. He has always been a poet of dusk and wit, where hope is blurred but despair is evaded through an ironic intelligence and unexpected swerves of the imagination.
—Jim Heynen, author of Ordinary Songs and Standing Naked: New and Selected poems, in praise of Stepping Into the River Once

Danny Rendleman, author of seven books, including: Stepping into the River Once, The Middle West, Victrola, Skilled Trades, and Asylum. His work has appeared in Agenda (UK), American Poetry Review, Field, Epoch, Beloit Poetry Review, Rolling Stone, and many other journals. He has taught rhetoric and creative writing at the University of Michigan-Flint, and now lives and writes in Mount Pleasant, Michigan.