Tales of a Distance: Poems
"I am grappling with a road I once traveled," writes Andrew Gottlieb, and with keen perspective and honest reckoning he invites us to travel with him. Between parents and children, fish and fisher, hardscrabble origins and later comfort, here and there, rural and cosmopolitan, now and then. In his search for a moment's import, Gottlieb has the patience of a fly-fisher untangling a line to lay it back on the rod to be cast again and perhaps catch new meaning. The polished exoskeletons of these poems—beautiful and intricate in their workings—protect a vulnerable, self-aware soul as they sing. This book honors the work of a poet waiting to be sounded by—and sounding—the world.
—Elizabeth Bradfield, author of Toward Antarctica and Once Removed
Coyotes and winter vistas, plunging rivers and still lakes and the "salmon's black back"—Andrew C. Gottlieb has a keen eye and ear for the natural world, its vagaries and truths, but perhaps what's even more impressive about this poetic debut is Gottlieb's willingness to speak honestly about pain—his own, his father's, ours—and yet still try "[t]o find belonging / among the wet pebbles shifting in our palm […]. / To try to name the question that memory / always is."
—Joe Wilkins, author of Fall Back Down When I Die, Thieve, and When We Were Birds