John Poch

Poetry. In TEXASES, his fifth collection of poems, John Poch offers readers a kaleidoscope through which to view his home state--its geography and people, its past and present. Here is a mix of forms (prose poems, formal poems, free verse) and moods (awe, critique, humor) as vast and varied as the Texas landscape. "In TEXASES, John Poch's vision of his land is as real as mesquite debris or a governor who 'jogs just down the road / with a pistol for coyotes.' At the same time, it is ethereal, entering poems visited by angels and biblical cadences and scriptural tones. Indeed, it is everywhere. Poch creates this landscape and its people with skill and beauty, in a voice that combines wisdom and humor, enlivening a book that is a joy to read."--Grace Schulman "Like the 'staked plains, dry-land, long view man' he praises in one poem, John Poch knows the harsh beauty of Texas, and in this new collection he gives us a plural, abundant portrait of his beloved place. Here are prose poems, sonnets, villanelles, and all the enduring pleasures of formal verse, brought back down to earth by Poch's unflinching eye, and his hard-won knowledge of work, and people, and the past. TEXASES is a kind of psalter, full of graceful and moving love songs to the land."--Patrick Phillips

Texases

Bill Beverly

Deborah Ager

Anthology of poems appearing in 32 Poems Magazine during its first 10 years of publication.

From the First 10 Years of 32 Poems Magazine

Old Flame

John Poch’s fourth collection of poems, Fix Quiet, is an ambitious exploration in verse of failure, death, and a redemptive beauty found in the surprise of order. From the opening poem, "Shrike,” which is itself a meditation on poetry as paradoxically both predator and prey, to the final love poem, a crown of sonnets, these poems unite the form and function of line, rhyme, syntax, rhetorical wit, and larger architectures, to capture moments in time and name them. Poems that move from the rivers of northern New Mexico to travel across Italy are concerned with how the limitations of time and place wound and disappoint but also how they expand our vision and take us deeper into experience. A river can’t be apprehended easily, but here by faith the poet takes the measure of the headwaters to the sea, of our greatest moving mysteries of love and death.

John Poch

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