In Beautiful Artifacts, the reader is swept into a vividly rendered landscape with carefully crafted moments that unfold with the kind of wisdom, vulnerability, and tenderness that can only rise from a place of deep contemplation. Rein writes, "I lost my faith when I lost my child," but the reader never loses faith in the speaker as we navigate the perils and beauty of nature, attention to the everydayness, love, profound loss, and the inevitable scrim of time passing. These poems address what is broken in this world without flinching and then strive to set it right until it all "hangs true," until the deepest wounds become "beautiful scars." -Megan Merchant, author of Hortensia, in Winter (New American Press) and editor of Pirene's Fountain
Stork Rein, in Beautiful Artifacts, opens the book with the loss of a child, a wound that never heals. The poet is left "searching for the seams between this world and the next." In Broken, he repairs a screen door sagging from one hinge, but relationships can't be fixed by replacing hardware. There is wisdom in this collection. Stork asserts, if "you are travelling alongside the fence, jump over." And he reveals it is the work itself, the engagement of the imagination, that matters. In these poems there is the "blaze of promise everywhere."
-Steve Trenam, published poet, teacher at Santa Rosa Junior College, and founding member of Poetic License Sonoma
Stork Rein's aptly titled Beautiful Artifacts demonstrates how the mysteries of loss-horses of grief / radiant sky / the sudden companionship of sorrow-can open us to an ever-expanding love of the world and all its inhabitants. As the devastating death of his young daughter spirals the poet into the unknowable, we witness the gradual embrace of his dying father and heartbroken mother, of the all that is myself and angels in the shape of flies. Read this love letter to life and prepare to be opened-wider, deeper, and closer to true.
-Prartho Sereno, Poet Laureate Emerita of Marin County, CA and author of Starfall in the Temple (Blue Light Press)
