Let It Be Told in a Single Breath
"More than any living poet I know, Russell Thorburn invites us into the company of recurring characters inhabiting a fully-formed world of the imagination. His work reads, collectively, like a vast, ongoing novel in which we join personalities from John Keats to John Lennon to Marilyn Monroe and get to discover what they are up to these days. In this new book, for example, I was delighted to learn that Keats and his gal Fanny are hiding out in the cold north, safe in an old hotel overlooking Lake Superior. And Thorburn and his readers get to play too, as he has the generosity and talent to write himself and us into this irresistible poetic Elysium (and sometimes Underworld) of his."
-Jonathan Johnson, author of May Is an Island
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"Only Russell Thorburn could have written this book, which is the greatest attribute of any book. What Thorburn brings to his subject matter moves beyond knowing and bleeds over into a way of seeing and saying and breathing. When I need to know who else in the world is feeling alive in the moment and nostalgic about the past and who wishes to celebrate those who've come before us, I know I can always turn to the poems of Russell Thorburn to make me believe that poetry does indeed matter, that it is still a living breathing way of being in the world."
-Peter Markus, author of When Our Fathers Return to Us as Birds
"Oh, the images that become coals within our memory. One thing I love: these poems protect the sensual phenomenology of love's reveries. As John Prine would say, these poems are more like souvenirs. Each is presented and bathed within a threshold where life became...what? Maybe where life became alive."
-Ken Meisel, author of The Light Most Glad of All
"Anachronistic poems comprise the best in Russell Thorburn's new collection, Let It Be Told in a Single Breath. With titles that elicit chuckles, making what follows irresistible ('John Keats One Evening Beheld Lake Superior'), we easily slip into narratives whose rhetoric turns on the unexpected, and lyrical poems about the poet's wife resonate deeply. In other pieces, most light and like cuts from film, appear Guillaume Apollinaire, Jack Kerouac, Billy the Kid, Charles Bukowski, Bob Dylan, Marvin Gaye, John Lennon, Marilyn Monroe, Sugar Baby, and others. This brilliant book immerses us in the impassioned memories of Russell Thorburn, shaped by the Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, Motown music, world poets, sports heroes, and other legendary figures."
-Beverly Matherne, author of Love Potions, Teas, Incantations, U.P. Poet Laureate (MI), 2023 & 2024
"The far ranging, complex poems in Thorburn's Let It Be Told in a Single Breath emerge from the page with heart and build to fever, into and out of dislocations in time, place, memory, insight. I couldn't help myself but to keep leaning in to catch hold of the voices from the page. 'When we turned over in our dreams / we found each other standing there together...and like all dreams / they end before they have begun.' Indeed, and too soon."
-M. Bartley Seigel, author of This Is What They Say, U.P. Poet Laureate (MI), 2021-22, Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow
