Any Moonwalker Can Tell You (Signed Copy)

If the turns and involutions of syntax model, as I suspect they might, the complexity of a writer’s thinking, Joel Peckham’s Any Moonwalker Can Tell You unfolds for readers a mindfulness as agile as it is ambitious, an intelligence the music of which Peckham conducts with tremendous verve.  In both subject matter and style, these poems move, from Mongolian throat singing to collapsing stars to the sweat-panic of high-school dances, from wit to wonder, from finely wrought image to sure rhetorical statement.  Peckham’s work is also, to be sure, profoundly moving.  In poems of great urgency, and with an almost unfathomable depth of feeling, Peckham celebrates the tenacity of joy and the fierceness of love even in the face of ecological, existential, and familial extinctions.  Any Moonwalker Can Tell You resonates with the music of loss.  Like the finest of symphonies, it is bold and beautifully patterned.  It is awe-full, like a spacewalk.

Christopher Kempf, Author of What, Though the Field Be Lost, LSU.