Park

"Josh Medsker’s PARK is an incantatory meditation on a delicate, yet resilient ecosystem. This poet lends reverent attention to the smallest details in nature, while joyfully mapping the transitions, ruptures – and yes, the yield and capitulations of the land to civil engineering. There is a timbre in many of these poems that suggest the poet's deep appreciation of haiku, if not in form, in the simplicity and elegance of their cadence. A masterful addition to Medsker’s repertoire, PARK is a book a reader may return to again and again, and still find new depths." – Laura Page, author of Dove, Coyote “In PARK, Josh Medsker writes that ‘so much is lost/between seeing a leaf/and writing about it,’ but through this collection, we see, and get to embrace, all of nature, from the Latin names of trees, to the moon, to the modern detritus of a ‘baby blue and white face mask.’ These poems invite us to ‘come closer’ to our world, and it is a joy to do so through this collection.” – Sarah Nichols, author of These Violent Delights and Hexenhaus “In the tradition of Whitman, we meet our dying natural world with song. Josh Medsker’s gift for joy and wonder is authentic and rare and we are its beneficiaries. PARK is a triumph of craft and verve as Medsker has unearthed the beating heart. New Jersey should crown him a native son if they know what’s good for them.” – Rogan Kelly, poet and editor of The Night Heron Barks “Josh Medsker’s collection is about what restores you when you’re mostly in solitude surrounded by nature. It is an invitation to daydream to the sounds of birds, trees, earth, grass, creatures and such. What affirmation it is to find that plenitude can be found in what thrives in the natural world. He recreates and immerses us in that experience in the most direct, delightfully sensory ways. Terns call… Kip! Kip! Kip! Come!” – Irene Toh, publisher of Red Wolf Editions “Josh Medsker’s PARK is an exquisitely rendered book of poems about a place. Traces of Dickinson, Williams, Cummings, and Gomringer remind us how poetry’s past remains available in the present, while Medsker’s deep feeling and precise language keep the poems grounded in a closely observed everyday. I enjoyed every poem.” — Roland Greene, editor-in-chief of The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics Fourth ed.