“Jim Cihlar’s The Shadowgraph presents a love song to the ways a young person desperate for kinship can find a surprising lifeline in the filmography of actress Barbara Stanwyck, a star casting a well-defined shadow for LGBTQ Americans even in the era of Hollywood’s ‘lavender marriage.’”
—Eric Gansworth, author of A Half-Life of Cardio-Pulmonary Function: Poems and Paintings
“Midway through James Cihlar’s splendid Rancho Nostalgia you’ll find some advice: ‘Keep reaching into the past / to grab something new.’ One of the great wonders of this book full of wonders is that Cihlar follows his own instruction so brilliantly. Whether invoking scenes from classic movies or from the poet’s own life, the results are poignant, complex, and full of bracing insights. These poems feel like they’re being projected from a beguiling, not-quite-familiar place somewhere behind us, ‘close to the border, where / the light is good.’”
—Mark Bibbins, author of The Dance of No Hard Feelings
“‘It is a long road to Moxie,’ notes the speaker in ‘The Reality Show,’ one of the contemplative and ultimately hopeful poems that make up A Conversation with My Imaginary Daughter. A sad, shrewd humor permeates this collection, as does a palpable sense of gratitude.’”
—Lyrae van Clief-Stefanon, 2012 Poetry Judge
“In James Cihlar’s collection, Undoing, we find an emotional richness and range convincingly authenticated by details of domestic disarray–a father’s absence, a mother’s rage, a child’s retreat into the language of his imagination. The result is a deepening meditation snipped into lyrics, measures that mirror the quiet immediacy of their white space, that move with unflinching precision, picking through the difficult remnants, transmuting alienation into lineage, heartbreak into grace, undoing into understanding.”
—Bruce Bond, author of The Anteroom of Paradise and Cinder
“When the world rights itself, bears will turn into bulls,” the title poem of Metaphysical Bailout promises. After the 2008 Wall Street crash, we struggled to understand what had happened economically. Bankers, politicians, and newscasters contorted language in new ways to express—and ultimately obscure and perpetuate—an old story of American life: the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. The eighteen poems in this chapbook highlight the bizarre and at times humorous ways in which language is perverted to support power, even while showing how language and story insist on telling on a greater truth. As “Modern Maturity” asks, “What if one day the men you trusted/ walked out, and suddenly,/ you woke up?”
Limited to a run of fifty, this chapbook was printed in 2015 by book artist Georgia Greeley through her Artichoke Press. The poems in What My Family Used apply “thing theory” to a late-century coming-of-age, exploring multiple perspectives in couplets pared down to concrete specifics. Hand-bound with a letterpress cover and endpapers, Family underscores the truth of William Carlos Williams’ maxim, “no ideas but in things.”