Chronic Observer by Doug Stuber

Over and over again Chronic Observer reflects the magic that happens when we bear witness.

Doug Stuber’s unflinching poems bring the witness of texture, tastes, hunger, and searing truth.

Nearly thirty years ago, poet and activist Audre Lorde wrote, “Without community, there is no liberation.” Chronic Observer offers an active search for that community, unity; a poetic development that is consistent with broadly designed concepts of commitment to liberation itself.

This new collection does not praise. There is no grandiosity. Instead, Chronic Observer allegorizes and casts its genesis in the language of archetypal struggles and timeless human themes. A bounty of metaphors craft shadows and spaces inside every line break where a new chemistry of poetics erupt and help us to name the nameless.

–Jaki Shelton Green, North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame poet, “Poet Laureate of North Carolina” distinction by governor, Roy Cooper.

“Reading Doug Stuber‘s poems makes me want to hit the streets with my megaphone and anti-something-or-other slogans.  Which is the kind of thing poems should do: move us not just to thoughtfulness, but to action. But Stuber’s no naif.  There is a sense of futility (some might call it outrage) in this well-designed book that, no matter how much one protests, or to whom, or in what medium, the imbalances of the world remains.  Still, the takeaway is hope. For every “War Sonnet” or diatribe (“James of Manning, South Carolina,” “Status Quo”), there is a corrective and encouraging “Hikaru” (a song of light and a powerful hero-girl), there is the reverie induced by the shadow of a Korean pine, there is a prayer (“KC and the Thanksgiving Prayer”). All the poems of Chronic Observer engage the world we are given, natural or political, fair or foul, as the given it is. Buy this book, read it. You’ll see what it means.”

–Clark Holtzman