River of Solace

Winner, 2016 Turtle Island Quarterly Editor’s Choice Chapbook Award.

According to Michael McGriff (author of Home Burial and Dismantling the Hills), In River of Solace, time twists up through the lives in these pages like a deep, dark root. The spells Lark casts are immediate and lasting, and the echoes of these poems will haunt you. This geographic and emotional terrain matters in all the ways that count.

Barbara Drake (author of Morning Light and Driving One Hundred) has this to say: In Gary Lark’s River of Solace he summons the spirits of past settlers and natives of the southern Oregon coast, a continental edge he describes as ‘like standing on God’s front porch.’ Beginning in that past, he traverses a history of settlement, wars, and succeeding generations of locals, until we seem to meet ourselves, as we face the unsettling question of whether this western landscape will be the new destination of eco-refugees in a vastly changed world.