Fugitive Blues

“In Fugitive Blues, Debra Kang Dean’s poems are at once small and large, honoring the ordinary even as they consider the ontological. This is a poet who understands there is an ‘unkillable law: Some thing must die/that others might live,’ and yet celebrates life with odes to beer and the brown-headed cowbird. Exquisitely imaged and skillfully crafted, these are poems a reader can move into and inhabit for a long while.”

—Sarah Freligh, author of Sort of Gone

“Debra Dean’s Fugitive Blues confronts ‘this theater under the stars’ with evocative poems that combine a microscopic attentiveness to language and to image with a macroscopic sensibility of our cosmic precariousness. Never daunted, Dean trudges through this ‘ankle-wrenching terrain’ where nonetheless we are ‘word-stirred’ by beauty.”

—Nathan Hoks, author of The Narrow Circle

“‘Once you know what you’re seeing, / the hour of innocence is past,’ Debra Kang Dean tells us in this remarkable new collection of poems. We see each side of that construction here, the world (and the poet’s experiences in it) gazed upon with both wonder and knowledge. Whether she is considering a bird or a distant planet or a microbrew, Dean shows us multiple levels: a nature photograph, for example, is both conventional in its beauty, but awe inspiring in the effort required to capture it. Somehow, Fugitive Blues moves us from the ordinary to the extraordinary, without leaving the ordinary behind. Quietly, these poems amaze.”

—Phil Memmer, author of The Storehouses of the Snow: Psalms, Parables, and Dreams