Time Is Always Now

<p>Rebecca Starks’s <em>Time Is Always Now</em> unfolds against a backdrop of nature often permeated in unexpected ways with the human dynamics of family neighborhood and nation. Her poems convey the urgency within moments of transformation—whether seasonal as in wilderness and garden; physical as in the trajectory of youth aging and death; or political as in the challenges of misgovernance and the environmental exigencies of our time. This finalist in the Able Muse Book Award is a finely wrought thought-provoking collection.</p><p><strong>PRAISE FOR <em>TIME IS ALWAYS NOW</em></strong></p><p>Drawing from sources as wide-ranging as Emily Dickinson <em>Apocalypse Now</em> fairy tales and social media Rebecca Starks’s <em>Time Is Always Now</em> deftly balances intelligence and pathos resisting easy dichotomies and judgments. As these fine poems insist the present is relentless and we are immersed: “No not out of time; helplessly in it.” Ours is a country of guns; ours is a “middle-aged earth” in decline—and yet we are here witnessing questioning. I am grateful for Starks’s voice in the present moment and I’m grateful to have her poems to carry with me into the future whatever it may bring.<br />  —Maggie Smith author of <em>Good Bones</em></p><p>Rebecca Starks writes with a sense that time can be stopped in a poem lives suspended and drawn inward even in the most aimless moments. There’s a wonderful clarity to <em>Time Is Always Now</em> an electricity that feels bright and wild. It’s to be found in the roadsides and a robin’s “clutch” in the retina that “registers pain” in the sky at dusk and the “months of mud.” I greet these poems with so much enthusiasm—these poems that crave clarify and propose sublime ways to become refreshed in our most confused times.<br />  —David Biespiel (from the foreword) author of <em>Republic Café</em></p><p>At one point Rebecca Starks describes a winter hike in which she crosses “sociable mouse hops two feet together” and passes “a squirrel’s scramble at the base of a tree/ then the bunched landings of a mustelid bound/ from the yawn under one log to another.” Several of her wonderful book’s qualities are evidenced here. If too many poets in their ignorance regard nature as a mere repository of metaphor Starks like Frost is both knowledgeable and uncannily <em>accurate</em> about it. (“Yawn” is the perfect word say in this passage.) Her sinuous and heavily subordinated syntax  is also suggestive of a mind with great range—geographical thematic and prosodic—though she can also as for instance in “American Flag” move by a cunning terseness.<br />  —Sydney Lea author of <em>The Music of What Happens: Lyric and Everyday Life</em></p><p><strong>ABOUT THE AUTHOR:</strong></p><p>Rebecca Starks grew up in Louisville Kentucky earned a BA in English from Yale University and a PhD in English from Stanford University and works as a freelance editor and as a teacher for the Osher Institute of Lifelong Learning program at the University of Vermont. Her poems and short fiction have appeared in <em>Baltimore Review Ocean State Review Slice Literary Crab Orchard Review Tahoma Literary Review</em> and elsewhere. Winner of <em>Rattle</em>’s 2018 Neil Postman Award for Metaphor and past winner of <em>Poetry Northwest</em>’s Richard Hugo Prize she is the founding editor-in-chief of <em>Mud Season Review</em> and a former director of the Burlington Writers Workshop. She and her family live in a log cabin in the woods of Richmond Vermont.</p>