Night Travelers (Paperback or Softback)

In her third book, Night Travelers, Carol Rucks invites us to go the distance on some splendid flights of imagination. We are rewarded in surprise, richness of language, (not orange but tangerine) and story. She often skillfully uses the skeleton of a common human experience and weaves it into a poem to give readers a blissful “aha” moment. In her poem, “A Man Took His Cell Phone for a Walk,” the dog pulls on the leash while the subject begins looking at his phone: “Nose first, the dog / sank into a hollow of grass, / as if the laws of patience / were a kind of sorrow.”

—Mary Junge, author of Creatures of Promise and Pilgrim’s Eye

Rucks takes us again into her dreamworld of loss, wounds and strange encounters. And too, she explores the colorful world of nature and her surrender to both darkness and light: “It is a common thing to lose nest, warmth, breath,” she tells us in the poem “Garden cycle.” Other poems read like a seance where old lovers and lost friends reach out to her in the night, as in the poems “In a Dream Someone Calls” and “False Memory of Purgatory.” Master of the shorter poem, Night Travelers moves between dark visitations of fear, and other poems that are short breaths of pure air.

—June Blumenson, author of A Scythe of Moon and The Quickening Light

In Night Travelers, Carol Rucks draws the reader into private moments, whether ordinary or extraordinary. Her uncanny ability to capture these moments with spare impressionistic language creates space for the curious to find themselves at home on these pages. Change and loss, the intersection of love and danger, and savoring life, are themes that she returns to throughout this volume. From the first somewhat voyeuristic evening ramble in “The Yellow Glow,” Rucks deftly brings us along for the journey.

—Cynthia Fuller, poet, psychologist, coach, and disability professional at the University of Minnesota