Mummer Prisoner Scavenger Thief

mummer: a person acting in a masked mimeprisoner: a person trapped by a set of circumstancesscavenger: a person who collects abandoned itemsthief: a person who takes things by stealth, without force or violenceThis collection begins in the realm of the mummer whose masked performance conceals the self and transforms language to better evoke what is too risky to speak overtly. Ransick's poems ply this tension between knowing and speaking in cadence and imagery that simultaneously disorients readers and beckons them forward, in lines whose half-remembered music refuses to be predictable. The role of the shunned figures in the title is to draw poems out from the margins of experience, to reclaim voices muted by more powerful forces, an elusive goal only the best poetry can accomplish. Travel along with them as guides, ready to steal and scavenge what you need for your own escape.

Chris Ransick, Denver poet laureate 2006-2010, is the author of six books, including Never Summer, which won a Colorado Book Award for poetry in 2003, and a collection of short stories entitled A Return to

Emptiness, a finalist for the 2005 Colorado Book Award in fiction.

Chris was born and raised in New York, and has lived in Colorado, Montana, Wyoming, and California, working variously as a newspaper reporter, editor, and professor, as well as teaching at Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver, where he was recognized with the Beacon Award for Teaching Excellence in 2013. He has served as a member of PEN USA's Freedom to Write Committee and closer to home, he spent eight years serving on his local public library board. His stories and poems have been presented on television, radio and stage, including collaborations with Ballet Nouveau Colorado.