Leftover Distances

"Mike James is a poet in love with bridges, a poet of praise

in search of connective tissue, relentlessly on the move,

searching for signifiers, trying to find that loose thread of

inspiration. "The sky is something we can drink from," he

writes. "Darkness is never clean or clear," knowing a human

being in love with mystery is never finished, and that the

world is mostly hidden from us, and poetry is one of the

ways humans discover the most important aspects of them-

selves, illuminating and untangling as it tells. These lovely

poems are a blessing, an unexpected warm wind blows

through them and amazing declarations shiver forth as

James travels and watches and listens. "Sound brings us to

our senses," said Thoreau, and the poems here are quiet

and tight, acutely aware of their own dissolution, and the

temporary spaces that we occupy. "The moon looks nothing

like the one I touched," writes James, and with a deft

surrealistic brush he fills in all the colors he finds and the

ones he had hoped to find. There are wonders to discover

in every poem and I gobbled them up. Sit with this book

and listen and the singing will settle in your imagination.

Don't just take my word for it, open the cover and start

swimming and you will be immersed in a better world."

-Keith Flynn, editor of The Asheville Poetry Review

and author of The Skin of Meaning

"Mike James writes with a toymaker's sense of wonder. His poems, like toys, delight and fascinate, leading the reader's imagination in strange and beautiful directions. 'I never put a feather back on a bird, ' he says in 'It's Lovely, at Last, ' and we, looking on, know exactly what he means and how that irrational failure feels. James's poems attack the mind with a surrealistic bent like the verses of James Tate. They spiral and swirl, then lift and float. 'Most of my friends live with hallucinations, ' he says in 'Discount Ghazal of Everyday Saints.' To read these poems is to be one of James's friends, dancing with phantasms. His writing is something to be experienced as much as read: a journey well worth taking."

-Ace Boggess, author of I Have Lost the Art of Dreaming It So and The Prisoners

"Like C.K. Williams, Mike James is a master of the flexible long line and its component parts. Compact in form, expansive in vision, his poems render ordinary events in startling focus, and find surreal gestures where most of us wouldn't expect them. I envy the precision and energy of poems like "Thinning Stars, Along the River," and the humor of those like "Where I'm From." This is a vivid and lively book, amusing and sobering at once."

--William Doreski, author of Riding the Comet