Ragged Anthem
Searing new poems from a vital American voice.
Ragged Anthem displays the same inimitable voice and unflinching gaze that made Chris Dombrowski a Poetry Foundation bestseller and silver medal winner of Foreword Reviews' Book of the Year Award in poetry. His work has been celebrated by renowned writers such as Jim Harrison and Alicia Ostriker, who have called his books (respectively) "extraordinarily powerful and graceful" and "one of the most beautiful books of poetry I've read in years."
As in Dombrowski's previous books, in Ragged Anthem the natural world is as alive and as fully realized as language allows. His comfort with the naming of the world, combined with a life lived intimately with the other species that populate the landscape of home, suggest an authenticity that few can claim. Ragged Anthem is a demonstration in continued poetic growth and expanded terrain. Written from the speaker's midlife, the poems delve into the transformation of family, childhood tragedies, and politics. Dombrowski lifts the veil on the imbecilic bureaucracies--those on Capitol Hill and in the faculty meetings occurring in our own conference rooms--that often help to whittle our fates. The book contains well-placed and evocative allusions to such figures as American painter Mark Rothko and Saint Francis of Assisi, as well as the periodic highlighting of language from contemporary song lyrics. These "borrowings" set forth a conversation between the poet and other artists that evoke the original source while transforming it into something new, proving that words, although artifice, live within our bodies, changing our relationship to place.
Ragged Anthem makes a powerful and important contribution to contemporary poetry. Fans of Dombrowski's past works and newcomers alike will bask in the poet's firm yet relaxed approach to the shaping of language.
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Chris Dombrowski is the author of the memoir Body of Water: A Sage, a Seeker, and the World's Most Alluring Fish and the poetry collections Earth Again (Wayne State University Press, 2013) and By Cold Water (Wayne State University Press, 2009). His poems have appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies, including Guernica, Gulf Coast, Poetry, Poetry Northwest, The Southern Review, and others.
CHRIS DOMBROWSKI talks a lot about "the gone" in his new book of poems -- the gone being the dead -- but he's still here. These wonderful poems ask why, and how durable he might be, faced with so much trouble. Which is not fully enumerated in Ragged Anthem, but we understand from the photo of the red-white-and-blue car door on the cover that we all own it, and we're all invited to bring whatever we've got. There is specific trouble, like deaths too intimate and suicide too tempting, and then there is the recently refreshed, universal disquiet about ourselves as Americans, the trouble fellow Montanan Thomas McGuane identified when he wrote the opening line to 92 in the Shade: "Nobody knows, from sea to shining sea, why we are having all this trouble with our republic." The difference being we have a pretty good idea now. We are all living there.
--Dean Kuipers "Los Angeles Review of Books"There's a poem in Ragged Anthem, the fantastic new book by Chris Dombrowski which comes out this week, that I think about a lot. It's been a long winter, and I printed the poem out and put it on the refrigerator, between the school lunch schedule and a drawing of Wonder Woman. In a collection so stuffed with near-perfect poems that its hundred-odd pages should outweigh an anvil, it's the one that comes to mind in March, when the path to the barn is lacquered in iced chicken shit, half the woodpile is frozen together from the one night I forgot to cover it, and my hands are beat-up and red. The wood-stove stays hungry but the light changes, and the Jays and Cardinals are staking out their territory in the early dark. I went out to fish the other day and wound up following some bobcat tracks to a deer kill, a sort of pinkish Times Square in the snow where every creature from eagle to coyote and fox had come to feed, and a good place to stand, a perfect physical counterweight to the technicolor psychoses of the internet. That's the kind of place where Ragged Anthem lives.
--Jeffrey Foucault "musician"The glorious song Ragged Anthem sings reveals Dombrowski's allegiance to the living systems of Earth, to kindness, sincerity, wisdom, vulnerability, family, to music and love and all such numinous things, and most of all, a brand of gritty, irreverent, and boldy imperfect grace available to all.
--Derek Sheffield "Terrain.org"Anyone who thinks poetry is just for sissies hasn't had the pleasure of reading Chris Dombrowski's Ragged Anthem released this spring from Wayne State University Press. Ragged Anthem is appropriately titled. Dombrowski's poems speak to the hard, sometimes brutal but always enduring spirit of nature and America. If you like poetry, [this book] should most certainly make your summer reading list. If you didn't think you liked poetry, this book could change your mind.
--Michael Tidemann "Writers and Writing column in Faribault Daily News"
