Kingfisher Blues by Erik Reece

Paperback Edition

At the intersection of alcoholism and recovery, Kingfisher Blues brings an unflinching eye and raw wit to one man's battle with addiction. Alternating between meditations on the natural world and gritty snapshots of the county jail, rehab center, and people who occupy these spaces with him—from strippers to soldiers—Reece ruminates on the thin line between life and death. Evocative and unfiltered, Kingfisher Blues weaves his experiences of Montana prairies, Kentucky woods, and Cumberland creeks into stories shared with neighbors, ancestors, former friends, and enduring partners.

These intensely personal yet universal poems boldly confront demons and deities while remaining skeptical about either's existence. By conveying the despair—and serenity—found in the loneliness of the woods and seeking self-acceptance in the face of ugly truths, this collection offers a visceral encounter with the intertwined forces of nature, human struggle, and redemption.

Erik Reece is the author of six books of nonfiction, including Clear Creek, Utopia Drive, and Lost Mountain, which won Columbia University's John B. Oakes Award for Distinguished Environmental Journalism and the Sierra Club's David R. Brower Award for Excellence in Environmental Writing. His work has appeared in Harper's, the Oxford American, the Atlantic, Orion, and other publications. His two earlier collections of poetry, A Short History of the Present and Animals at Full Moon, were published by Larkspur Press. He teaches writing and literature at the University of Kentucky and is the founder of Kentucky Writers and Artists for Reforestation.

Like everything Erik Reece writes, Kingfisher Blues is both beautiful and important. Honest and precise, often harrowing and always revelatory, these poems showcase a writer at the top of his form.

~Silas House, author of Southernmost

Myth is the bedfellow of truth, and Erik Reece draws from Greek lore, jazz, Chinese poets, and his American walking companion Henry David Thoreau. But it's the poet's own desperate story about addiction's destruction of life that rewrites the worlds of gods and humans. At times brilliantly surreal and at other times stripped so bare we can see the skeleton of the man writing, Reece sings a blues that's brutal and deeply moving, that reveals why some of us want to "shed this skin and dive into the dark forgetfulness." When I witnessed the poet restring his upright bass with barbed wire, I was certain for the first time in a long while that artifice matters, that poetry might make something of use.

~Todd Davis, author of Ditch Memory: New and Selected Poems

Kingfisher Blues is a searingly honest and stark account of life as an addict, with all the damage that life causes. This book, however, is not uniformly dark. Amid the brute and terrifying glimpses of Reece's own degraded façade, and the great cost of its maintenance, there is kindness, grace, and even humor. Kingfisher Blues is important, both because of its accomplishments as poetry, and because it speaks so directly and hopefully to one of the besetting ills of our current moment.

~Jeffrey Skinner, author of Sober Ghost