IntotheGoodWorldAgain Format: Book Book

In these unsettling pandemic times, former Wisconsin Poet Laureate Max Garland offers poems of grace, resilience, and healing remembrance.

These are poems of remembering, not only the anguish and isolation of the global pandemic, during which most were written, but also remembering as a creative or restorative force. Max Garland's poems walk on a wire of remnant faith that even in the news-glutted age of social media, there's a role for poetry, "...news that Stays news," as one poet put it nearly a century ago. There's an evocative range: from the surrealistic conjurings of a child's mind at bedtime, to the fragmented memory of an aging widow, struggling to recall the details of her life, or if not the details, at least the emotional truth of that life, realizing that for her, "Memory is more like poetry than poetry."

Max Garland's previous award winning books include The Word We Used for It, The Postal Confessions, and Hunger Wide as Heaven. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Michener Foundation, the Bush Foundation, and inclusion in Best American Short Stories, among many other awards. Born and raised in western Kentucky, where he worked for many years as a rural letter carrier on the route where he was born, he later attended the Iowa Writer's Workshop. He is currently Professor Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, and is the former Poet Laureate of Wisconsin. He lives in Eau Claire, Wisconsin.