City Walks by Rachel King

Rachel King’s poems are like postcards from the city she loves, written with a devotion, intensity, and precision that bring to mind the work of painters such as Edward Hopper and Andrew Wyeth. The abandoned field behind her childhood home gave her “a lifelong desire / for hidden, beautiful gritty things,” allowing her to see the broken world as well as lament loss: “Have the starfish been gone so long,” she wonders, “that people don’t outwardly mourn?” Like the poetry of Wendell Berry, King’s poems call us to love a little more humbly, a little less selfishly.

–Charity Gingerich, poet, author of After June

“To love darkness is to love creation,” Rachel King tells us, and this book of poems both loves and grieves this world, and the worlds within this world. With precise details wired to lively music and memorable images—“toddlers dancing . . . oblivious . . . to a world larger than pumpkins darkening towards fall”—King’s book is a plumb line drifting toward both mortal beauty and the poignancy of living in awareness of it.

–Mark Wagenaar, poet, author of most recently Southern Tongues Leave Us Shining