Product Overview
Author: Alan Basting
Publisher: Kelsay Books
Paperback: 50
Alan Basting’s Apples & Crows offers a delightful display of metaphysical conceit which is present within the title itself. Whether he’s conflating fishing with sleep or harbors haunted by both the dead and the living, Basting’s verse guides readers on past whiskey-drunk donkeys and shamans sharing church pews with grizzlies. Probing human curiosity beyond the five senses, Apples & Crows offers heavily lineated poems that skillfully create tension around the corner of each line, each stanza. This is a fun collection that only offers more secrets upon the reread.
—Jeremy Jusek, poet laureate of Parma (2022-2023) and author of We Grow Tomatoes in Tiny Towns
Alan Basting is in love with the world, in all its manifestations—not only its sweet apples
and human intimacies, but also its crows and longings and the surrealism of dreams. And
as evidenced in this lyrically brilliant collection of (need we say) love poems, the world
obviously loves him in return, for even in moments of uncertainty and heartache, the
author finds himself “happy enough.” The reader even more so. Every poem in Apples &
Crows—like the snow in “The World Announces Affection in December’s Snow and
Fog”—“attains love’s earthly shape / Through touch, consecration, embrace.”
—Phillip Sterling, author of the poetry collections And Then Snow, Short on Days,and
Mutual Shores, among others
