How to Draw Fire by Marcus Whalbring

How to Draw Fire is an achievement of imagination and surprise. This collection of poems approaches the familiar world from an offbeat angle that makes the exploration of childhood, love, marriage, parenthood, and mortality fresh and deeply understood. Whether in a cemetery with a yellow highlighter or living in a town that is contained within a box, Marcus Whalbring creates an honest, insightful, and complex voice that expresses strange and profound truths. These poems are driven by quirky logic that pulls the reader into a realm both physical and philosophical, where tenderness and loneliness are clear. 

–Laura Van Prooyen

With narrative that skates on narrative’s edge, gilded with humor, honesty, and the strange, the poems of How to Draw Fire create domestic scenes of doubt, delight, and dismay, turn to suburbs of place and relation, and offer strands of disconnection and connection. Here Whalbring treads on the makings and markings of boyhood and manhood and brings the numinous as he teases the tensions of life and love into focus, gorgeously. Moving with familiarity as they query and reveal, the poems delight, become like “rain sliding through smoke and diminishing fire”: familiar, uncanny, beautiful, and welcome.

–Hoa Nguyen

Interview about the book on NPR for the Cincinnati station WVXU:      https://www.wvxu.org/post/new-poetry-marcus-whalbring#stream/0