BLACK LEAPT IN
“Black Leapt In fathoms the infinite distance between once and now. A boyhood open as ‘a blue sky with a blimp in it’ is, in an instant, interrupted: ‘I woke with no father. I knew what the sea wouldn’t say. What I’d lost it had taken.’ Loss immense and entire is not the subject of this beautiful volume as much as a force that charges and changes every moment of perception, every act of speech. In poem after pitch-perfect poem, Chris Forhan summons back into being the texture of time—of a time, in all its inimitable particularity: a moth’s wing ticking at a window, a box of sparklers, a plastic soldier tied to a parachute, confetti in an astronaut’s crewcut, a patio chair, the wake-robin trillium. He raids the treasury of memory to give a full accounting; he climbs from the dark to proclaim, ‘No joy shall incur a debt / under my administration.’ Generous and artful, mordant and courageous, Chris Forhan has composed a work of hard-won knowledge and daring insight, driven by the desire to ‘listen differently,’ by an attentiveness whose promise is nothing less than atonement. His wish—for ‘a clarity of mind / with fire in it’—has been granted.”
—Phillis Levin, judge of 2008 Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize
“Open Black Leapt In to any poem for the thrill of finding a poet of eerie energy breaking new ground. These pages are full of unexpected images, passionate energy, and entirely new ways of making the homely, heartbreaking world as beautiful and odd as it deserves to be. The lines and their grief-stricken cadences invent a new music for the American experience. ‘Improbable: our toes and shoes, the tongues and laces . . .’ of ‘Fourth Grade Science.’ ‘That billowy thing in flames back there? / That’s not my circus tent. Never seen it.’ I have been reading Chris Forhan’s poetry with pleasure for many years, but this new book kept me up late with its tricks and terrors as no recent collection has, thank God, for a long, long time.”
—Laura Kasischke
“These poems have in them something of Theodore Roethke’s excitement at being alive in the physical world—how much there is to see!—as well as Roethke’s certainty of the darkness threaded all through the world. Yet they remain wholly Chris Forhan’s poems—brooding and exuberant, tender and amazed. ‘The heart gets sad, you slap it,’ he writes. Fiercely observant, richly inventive, and sometimes very funny, Black Leapt In is a terrific book.”
—Lawrence Raab
“In his stunning new book, Black Leapt In, Chris Forhan makes narrative probe and sing the haunted, haunting landscapes of childhood and adolescence. Forhan unfolds his inventory of losses and joys with an unerring ear and an eloquence bordering on the visionary.”
—Gregory Orr
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