James Longenbach (1959–2022) was the author of seven volumes of poems and eight books of prose. His honors include an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
"The poems in Forever wash over you like waves, lift you up and set
you down back at the beginning of your life. Some of the people are
familiar; the landscape is beautifully strange. You pick up your
favorite book and start reading it again, but for the first time.
Longenbach’s lucid poems echo across decades, bound for poetry’s
future."
*Rob Schlegel*
"Magnificent. At once elemental—Freud might say "oceanic"—in its
psychic vista, yet particular as one man’s life, loves, and losses,
Forever is a wrenchingly personal account of memory, sorrow, and
profound beauty, rendered in lyric poetry. It is also James
Longenbach’s finest book, wrought of remarkable paradoxes—to be so
precise, so spare, yet to be so inclusive, so elegant—where
mortality shadows every erotic or tender gesture. That such
existential breadth of vision comes at our moments of deepest
crisis is—let me be clear—never a given. But it is, in Forever,
Longenbach’s gift."
*David Baker*
"The lyric poems of James Longenbach’s Forever devastate, for they
enact with such precision the very problem they pronounce: that the
pleasure of the language we read can, like memory, only approach
the lives we actually live. Line by line, the poems’ likelihood to
narrate, repeat, or gorgeously veer describes what it is to love
and simultaneously feel oneself inside the grandiosity of
time."
*Sally Keith*
"In the pages of this tender, immediate, sharp book, you can find
something our world has made nearly impossible: language freed of
lies that nevertheless consoles. James Longenbach turns his cry
outward, as if toward a friend in a future he won’t see, surveying
childhood and marriage, surface and depth, Europe and America, with
a sonic minimalism buoyed as much by the comedy in our affairs as
the tragedy of their brevity. I’m certain I’ll remember the most
beautiful poems in this book for my entire human life."
*Katie Peterson*
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