Outskirts Press, INC.

Joel Fry’s poems chart a deeply interior quest. Though the object is predictable—understanding, love, friendship, hope—the poems are highly original. Deep within, where external and internal landscape merge, where easy solutions like monetary success and comfortable suburbia go down before a sharp irony, we meet fleeting memories of a childhood farm, a creek beside which boys played, rare moments of love where a couple sits on a porch. We also meet loneliness, despair, glimpses of truth, and a pervasive joy in the act of creation. The poems are disciplined, intuitive, paradoxical, richly imagined—repaying, over and over, the attention and agility required of those who would follow the poet. Fry leaves us “poised on the edge of a mystery / [we] cannot command, a chorus [we] cannot escape.” Harry Moore, author of Time’s Fool and Bearing the Farm Away