My Father's Hand Is a Mountain Range

Opening with an ode to the freckles on his father's hand C. P. SHAFER's debut poetry collection takes the reader on a journey into the mountains of life and the wilds therein. From a catalog of sounds that his father makes while getting ready for work to a retelling of Theseus which paints the ancient hero as a poster child for classic abandonment issues - each poem is a saw-tooth landscape that unfolds before you / offering / what hasn't been mapped... Just as in nature there is pain beneath all beauty C.P. SHAFER's prose pushes up through the mire of suicides break-ups and the inevitable betrayals of the body to see passing birds as spilled ink and fatherhood as a chance to transform the poison inside us into life. Crush the fragile enough... the poet speculates ...and the remnants become immovable that's how mountains are made: cores bleeding to fill the cracks; deformities rising in a universe falling.My Father's Hand Is a Mountain Range is a parade of deformities that explore masculinity mortality and the slivers of light we might otherwise miss during our brief bone-soaked waltz with rain.