One of Seven Billion

With conversational language and stripped-down wisdom, Tim Sherry’s One of Seven Billion is at once intimate and anonymous, revealing and evasive. In a time when many poets seem to value irony and wit, Sherry offers poems that are intelligently solid and emotionally honest. The speaker in many of these poems strikes me as a modern-day relative of William the Poet from the long, allegorical, Christian narrative Piers Plowman of the Middle Ages. He questions without finding answers then accepts that the act of questioning is what each of the seven billion of us must do to exist meaningfully. Posing such impossible questions can be a solitary process but despite the poet’s instinct for loneliness, he creates a community where Claude Monet, John Wayne, Lana Turner, and The man Upstairs meet at the center of the universe to celebrate life, love and the imagination. –Allen Braden, author of A Wreath of Down and Drops of Blood