Sun & Urn: Poems [Paperback]

CHRISTOPHER SALERNO resides in Caldwell, New Jersey, where he serves as associate professor in the creative writing and MFA programs at William Paterson University.Christopher Salerno’s fourth collection of poems, Sun & Urn, is a book made from the wild stuff of grief and loss. Readers will find in these lyric poems a peculiar force pushing beyond the obvious. Sad, tender, whimsical, this book mines the poet’s personal journey through grief for a universal look at how we as human beings handle our greatest losses. Coursing through this work is the clarity of vulnerability. With an idiosyncratic and inquisitive lyricism, Sun & Urn examines, repositions, and makes art from the odd scraps left over after a father’s sudden death, from infertility and divorce, and from the hope of new love.Poetry that pushes beyond the tragedies of loss to the wilder realms of renewal and meaningIf a poet ends a poem early in a book with, ‘And always a hellhound be,’ I keep reading. If, several poems later, a speaker is burning his deceased father's toupee in the yard, I keep reading—harder, closer. Christopher Salerno's Sun & Urn is a highly accomplished (he has learned his trade!), a madly imaginative, and, ultimately, a brilliant and deeply human book. Read it, please, thrice!In his haunting fourth collection, Salerno weaves a morbid kind of melancholia into the mundane and negotiates the experience of loss and a lack of fulfillment…The poems disquietingly hum with questions of what to do after death—whether one’s own or another’s. For whatever simple answers the poet seems to have for great unspoken questions—‘There are ways to say die/ without a findable body’—Salerno wields just as many queries, yielding a book ripe with eerie and meaning-filled unknowing.Christopher SalernolóS