Escape Envy (Paperback or Softback)

"Ace Boggess's ESCAPE ENVY is a book of reckoning, a poetry collection that takes clear-eyed but tender measure of what we lose when we lose ourselves-to addiction, heartache, incarceration, and to time's ravenous passage. In richly layered love poems, elegies, and portraits of minor catastrophes, Boggess examines what imprisons us and what can set us free. Sometimes, the beauty of a rose garden saves us as "[w]e breathe in until we suffocate / from pleasure." Sometimes, a person's recollected love continues, despite long absence, to salvage us "again & again ad infinitum." And always, there are poems, like these poems, offering us succor, singing us home."

-Francesca Bell, author of BRIGHT STAIN

Ace Boggess is author of six books of poetry, including THE PRISONERS, ULTRA DEEP FIELD, and I HAVE LOST THE ART OF DREAMING IT SO, as well as the novels STATES OF MERCY and A SONG WITHOUT A MELODY. He earned his B.A. from Marshall University and his J.D. from West Virginia University. He serves as Senior Editor at THE ADIRONDACK REVIEW and Associate Editor at THE EVENING STREET REVIEW. His poems have appeared in MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW, HARVARD REVIEW, NOTRE DAME REVIEW, J JOURNAL, NORTH DAKOTA QUARTERLY, and many other journals. His awards include the Robert Bausch Fiction Award and a fellowship from the West Virginia Commission on the Arts. In addition, he was locked up for five years in the West Virginia prison system, an experience which has been the basis for much of his writing. He currently resides in Charleston, West Virginia.