Phone Ringing in a Dark House

Rolly Kent returns to poetry with a book that explores the mysteries and comforts of the known and unknown.

Phone Ringing in a Dark House is filled with the mystery of loss, love, and the restorative powers of memory and language. In these forty-eight poems, the product of an intense return to poetry after a twenty-year absence, Rolly Kent writes about ordinary moments when the known and unknown overlap. These poems are, as one of the stars in the night sky says early in the book, a response to our wish not only to live but to “live again.”

After attending Middlebury College, Rolly Kent received an MFA from the University of Arizona. For many years he taught poetry around the Southwest and on many tribal lands. He ran one of the first public library-based community writers projects, bringing poets and writers to prisons, nursing homes, women’s shelters, and branch libraries in Tucson. His work has appeared in numerous magazines, including the American Poetry Review, Atlantic, Nation, and Poetry. He is the author of The Wreck in Post Office Canyon and Spirit, Hurry. He lives in Los Angeles.