Trespassers by Christopher Locke

Reading Christopher Locke‘s exquisite Trespassers, one can’t help but marvel at his masterful command of metaphor and sensory images—startling, often brutal and unsettling, but always apt. In Locke’s trespassed landscapes, heat is made palpable as a “heavy broth of light,” birds “buckshot” the air, and Aztec gods bear names “like hornets.” Poem by poem, Locke’s language anoints the ordinary and raises it toward transcendence. Whether set “There” in Mexico or “Here” in a rented house in coastal Maine, these poems navigate between an inner emotional realm, fraught with the speaker’s fear of dissolution and loss, and the outer physical world, at once dangerous and comfortingly familiar, where life is nourished—or unexpectedly challenged—by the numinous beauty that “rises / from the common, caught fluttering / in the breath of every day.”

–Richard Foerster

Christopher Locke‘s poetry is like a fiery dance, stepping between street litter, bopping around broken beer bottles, fetid water into “the places where sunlight comes to die” in Mexico, then twirling and twisting among the “tough angels” and “icy rust” of a Maine winter. Each poem’s movement, the brilliant images and alluring language, the cutting emotions, swing you into endings with revelations about life, as if swaying to a new musical chord. You become so smitten that you await the music on the next page to begin the dance again.

–Gary Metras, author of The Moon in the Pool