“Donald Platt’s aptly titled and arresting fourth collection of poems, Dirt Angels, examines how we exist in states of physical disrepair, decay, and disability: the world’s transience exhibited in the slow degradation of our very consciousness and flesh. And yet this awareness should not incapacitate us, Platt suggests; rather, it should further disarm us to the fleeting charms that make up a life: the corruptible beauty in the bodies of our children and loved ones, the ways language itself haphazardly‘cross-pollinate[s], misspoken and misheard’ and yet still blossoms. Dirt Angels offers its readers resolute, if embattled, joyfulness through Platt’s gorgeous language: itself a sinuous vocabulary of praise even in the face of mishap and pain.”

      —Paisley Rekdal

Praise for My Father Says Grace:

“The third poem in this collection, which lends the book its title, is a treasure. Platt excels at taking a modest human, often familial, moment and exploding it to reveal the dense possibilities within.”

      —Patricia Monaghan, Booklist

“On almost every page there is a marvelous to-and-fro between darkness of loss—a father’s approaching death, a brother’s vulnerability—and the exuberance of language, the sheer eloquence of organization which are no less than their due. These are wonderful poems; they make superb, wrenching reading.”

      —Eavan Boland

“Donald Platt’s poems are fearless and generous aria-narratives, each distilling complex essences into a single, telling scene; through their attentive particularities, universal colors emerge. The abiding affirmation in Donald Platt’s work is that whatever exists must be made welcome and known. The result is an optimistic book, full of compassion, interest, and sheen, in an age when an unblinded optimism is much needed.”

      —Jane Hirshfield

New Issues Poetry & Prose, Western Michigan University, Dept. of English,
1903 W. Michigan Ave., Kalamazoo, MI 49008-5331
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