““Sometimes things just / end,” writes Larry Colker, “but we name it/change.” In his new collection of poems, Amnesia and Wings, the poet has reinvented the ode, the ballad, & the lament. It turns out we never leave this world; it leaves us, touch by touch and thing by thing. But there are enchantments in the empty spaces if we would only look for them. We will never be made whole again but, “That’s not the point: enchantment, even for a day, / can make a whole life bearable.””
—Brendan Constantine
“Linguistically playful, unabashedly romantic, combining wit and irony and unrelenting longing, Larry Colker’s poems remind us that it’s never too late to lose everything, never too late to risk everything again. In Amnesia and Wings, the world is seen through the eyes of a speaker who seems to be both a kind of spy in his own house of love and a kind of film noir anti-hero of his own life. He looks back and looks forward and wants, after all, the caterpillar’s gift to the butterfly—“Amnesia and Wings”—and he makes us want that, too.”
—Cecilia Woloch
“Larry Colker’s Amnesia and Wings speaks insightfully. passionately, and poignantly of love: old and new, experienced and innocent, agonized, ecstatic, lost, found, and rescued. A master of the apt and unexpected metaphor, Colker spikes emotion with wit to keep readers engaged and on their toes. This book won’t give you amnesia; it will refresh your memory. It will give your imagination wings.”
—Charles Harper Webb
