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J.T. Knoll’s book, Counterpart, is a breath of fresh cut grass and peaceful like a summer night. He leaves us wanting to know more about the small-town pool hall owner who watches over the high school kids and the neighbor lady who shares her peonies. He finds mercy in the elderly mother who has grown kinder as her memory grows softer. Like William Stafford and Carl Sandburg, Knoll writes clear and subtly insightful poems that draw on precise descriptions of the natural world. The big Kansas sky, the beloved dog, and the train run throughout the book. Knoll loves Kansas like one might love cheerios, and dandelion bracelets. Anyone viewing Kansas through his eyes will love it, too.
-Beth Gruver Gulley, The Sticky Note Alphabet
(Alien Buddha Press)
The poems in J.T. Knoll’s excellent collection Counterpart manages to pull off the minor miracle of being both Kodachrome-saturated snapshots of memory and timeless. Shifting between a blue collar Kansas that may no longer exist and the present, Knolls creates a personal mythology of experience. This is poetry on a very human level, delivered at a time when we might desperately need it the most.
-Troy Schoultz, author of No Quiet Entrances and
co-author of Remnants.
J.T. Knoll’s poems consistently find the remarkable within the mundane; the spiritual, if not religious, within the secular. Some poems are lyrical, both humorous and ironic, songs to the living; others are hardscrabble from the coal mines, the railroad, the corner black market fireworks stand, alive with people, those we’ve known and possibly forgotten. Counterpart connects the ordinary to the extraordinary. Each poem is a tribute to our everyday communion with the transcendental. It’s a book for the nightstand and for tomorrow.
- Al Ortolani, Swimming Shelter
With precise, evocative language J.T. Knoll captures the essence of life in rural Kansas. Whether his subjects are coal miners, farmers, neighboring housewives or his own childhood, Knoll’s poetry reminds us that by looking at the everyday world around us, by listening to human stories and by connecting to nature, we can find the spiritual in the quotidian. He makes the ordinary extraordinary.
- Elizabeth Winthrop Alsop, Daughter of Spies:
Wartime Secrets, Family Lies
