From Never Summer: Poems From Thin Air, Ghost Road Press, 2005
Winner of the Colorado Book Award (1st Edition)

About the author
Denver Poet Laureate Chris Ransick has won awards for his books of poetry and fiction, as well as recognition for his workshops and speaking appearances. His work with writers and writing extends from his local library and schools to the international community of PEN USA’s Freedom to Write Committee. A lover of all things literary, Chris has 27 years of professional experience with college-level courses and community workshops.

Blurbs
“Never Summer speaks tenderly…Layered so the perception of reality becomes at times almost super-real.”—Mary Crow, Colorado Poet Laureate

“Following Richard Hugo as much as John Wesley Powell, Chris Ransick is an exacting cartographer of the West’s vast landscapes, physical and emotional, rendering them with such care you will agree with him, ‘This is where / you have always lived, no matter what they say.’”—Jake Adam York, author of Murder Ballads and the forthcoming A Murmuration of Starlings
From Never Summer: Poems From Thin Air

Ghost In the Wen

Sometimes it seemed
the tree had grown a face
eliberately to peer through

their back window. The bark
on the burl had lips
where lips should be,
a mouth that might speak
if it could uncurl
its wooden grimace.

Light & shadow wrestled
on the mat of grass
atop meandering roots,

no victor but night
to close down the contest again.
What did those eyes see?

Was she moving toward him
again and again,
almost violent, her hands

frightened birds,
tangling before taking hold,
feathers batting the glass?

Theirs was one story
but there had been others:
the man who built the house

kneeling out back in the snow,
praying, as wind
blew drifts about him.

There was never any path
worn beneath that tree. No fruit
hung where early blossoms rode

on April winds until late frost.
Yet living wood grew green
beneath the bark

and late at night
the twisting wood would groan
as if to speak.

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From Lost Songs & Last Chances, Ghost Road Press, 2006Blurbs
“The collection’s voice pulses with surprising turns and a deep mystical playfulness with language in songs meditative, rich, and keenly aware of the power of silence and observation. [It] brings us elegies for the land, for loved ones, for the West and its diverse peoples and histories, offering a balm for our own losses. Wry humor mixes with uncanny wisdom, deep lyrical waters to nourish us in our fragility, our own place in a seemingly contradictory natural world. Poems about boyhood, youthful adventure, old age, war, and survival leave us to wonder, “What voice could join these harmonies and last as long as water and wind?” So we too dive deep into our nameless vanishing, to the bottom of the ocean with Ransick in this ambitious collection that heals with a lively movement from lamentation to praise.” —Sheryl Luna, author of Pity the Drowned Horses“With sweeping range in both subject and form…here is a confident voice, sometimes intimate, other times humorous, and always candid. These clear-sighted, engaging poems are the work of a writer with a sharp eye and an ear tuned to “the river’s full-throated song.” —Albert Garcia, author of Skunk Talk“These are good poems, but they’re also good stories. They swim in a deep pool of experience and the leaps you make in and out of the water embolden your spirit. You’ll want more of these dramas, ones you sometimes recognize, yes, but dressed up—lyric negligees spun like alpaca fleece from the weavings of a father, husband, and free-thinking mime of the wildly imaginable moment.” —Art Goodtimes, author of As If the World Really Mattered

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Poem Sample

February Twilight, Lost Miner Ranch

Catlike, a creature moves
across the field, belly-deep
in drifts. Three horses

at the far fence don’t bolt,
but surely their eyes,
like mine, are turned to this.

Soon, a weak sun will fall finally
silent and a gibbous moon will
blow pale blue from the sky

across the snow. Soon,
late winter will forgive the creek
for trickling toward spring

and relinquish all its ice.
But this night, all holds fast,
thaw-songs captured in turf.