[Ned Balbo]

Hi, everyone ~

The Cylburn Touch-Me-Nots, awarded the 2019 New Criterion Poetry Prize, is now available for pre-order from Amazon. The book itself should become a reality (and start showing up in mailboxes) around December 3rd.

Happily, the Amazon page includes the "Look inside" option, so rather than buying "a cat in a bag," as my late Dad Carmine would have put it, you can check out a few selected poems to see if they're worth any of your long-saved Amazon points.

The generous back cover comments (for which I'm grateful) are from Morri Creech and Chelsea Rathburn, two poets I think most of us here hold in very high esteem.

"In The Cylburn Touch-Me-Nots, Ned Balbo ranges from the grave to the celebratory, from epithalamium to elegy, from spiritual yearning to earthly delight. He explores both the unsettling depths of experience and the sensual and aesthetic pleasures which buoy us up. Delivered with a deftness of phrasing and a formal precision that are rare in contemporary poetry, this is a rich and compelling book of poems." -- Morri Creech

"The Cylburn Touch-Me-Nots is a book of radical transformations. Reinventions of poems by Baudelaire, Apollinaire, and Rimbaud sing alongside poems that interrogate and transform the poet’s own history, in which biological and adoptive families intersect, secrets abound, and the past ripples across the present. Grappling with family ties as snarled as a fishing line, 'a tangle to endure,' these poems are marvelous for their emotional and narrative complexity—that such complexity is rendered in perfectly wrought poetic forms makes them even more impressive. 'Is it a gift to hold you as he did?' the speaker asks his birth father’s compass, an emblem of memory and loss. For the reader who holds this book, the product of a complex past and a richly-lived present, the answer can only be yes. --Chelsea Rathburn

Here's the link. Happy fall, and thanks for taking a look!

https://www.amazon.com/Cylburn-Touch...JRTPMNAQTH6XBY