Amends by Randy Koch

$17.99

Paper

Pre-order Price Guarantee until September 18, 2026

This title will be released on November 13, 2026

When love goes wrong, when the evaded look or avoided questions aggravate, when things unsaid or said thoughtlessly fester, dissolution often follows. In Amends, Randy Koch’s fourth book of poems, he considers love’s unresolved failings—both real and illusory—that rankle with regret and for which atonement is necessary but sorely belated. Imagined or recalled through a dense coastal fog, behind razor wire or a Chinese restaurant, during a long-distance phone call, or on the tangled edge of a slough, love’s trials and losses appear again and again—shadowed by guilt, a need to face faults, and the hope of making amends.

Proceed to Checkout

BookSKU:

Description
Reviews (0)

Amends is Randy Koch’s fourth collection of poems. His other works include Composing Ourselves (Fithian Press, 2002), This Splintered Horse (Finishing Line Press, 2011), and Against the Risen Flesh (forthcoming from Alternating Current Press). A longtime columnist for LareDOS: A Journal of the Borderlands, he earned an MFA at the University of Wyoming and authored the textbook Serving Sentences. His work has been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize.

PRAISE:

With trepidation and intrigue, we are ushered into Amends by an enchanting but tense incantation: “What I felt for her was instinctual, genetic. What I felt was imprinted on me with the certainty of a migratory route.” Throughout this collection, rhythm and internal rhyme play against the dissolution of a love affair, the book’s true subject, every poem layering it with metaphoric weight “like a memory waving from so great a / distance it resembles imagination.” In both lyric and narrative poems, Amends admits that “[d]isappointment is a form of love.” Yet, it’s the long “Memorata,” written in an irreverent, pained tone, that braids the book’s themes, characters, and reveries together in literary delight. Highly recommended!

–Anne Dyer Stuart, What Girls Learn

Randy Koch’s poems bear us into the storm of “thunderous love.” Love lost, love broken, love defied. How do we match and cleave, split and spite? How do we fashion survival and forgiveness? The beauties of Amends remind us “[t]here is hope even in words blown away.”

–Alyson Hagy, author of Keeneland, Boleto, Ghosts of Wyoming, and Hardware River

Love in its many manifestations is the plangent pivot on which the words of Randy Koch’s Amends turn. His well-crafted nuances and subtleties precisely and powerfully frame the mystery of passion and the bewildering, cratered landscape of loss, betrayal, remorse, and regret. His mastery of narrative for place is one of the most refined attributes of his writing.

–María Eugenia Guerra; Publisher, LareDOS, A Journal of the Borderlands

Reviews

There are no reviews yet.

Be the first to review “Amends by Randy Koch”