Confessional by Fletch Fletcher

“We are creatures of secrets,” Fletch Fletcher writes, each page of this book a “space of white / that is my confessional.” These self-interrogations of one who laments a father’s absence, “the impotence of prayer,” and the loneliness of the outsider, who imagines “the sound the sky made / when it first saw the ocean fill itself” and “dawn through ruffled eggshell drapes,” are informed by both a Beat sensibility and the turbulent romanticism of Goethe. Fletcher leans toward affirmation, remembering “untilled plains, / clean and free / of headstones” while recognizing that “confession and storytelling are both true / to the soul if not always / to the tongue.” Confessional is a disturbingly raw and profoundly tender sequence.

–Michael Waters, author of Caw

In the vital candor of Confessional, Fletch Fletcher unmasks the heart nearly deadened by myths of masculinity, measures the weight of blood, lays bare depression’s loneliness, and reveals how the self can be an ocean that fills itself, that inhales primal fear and shame and then push[es] a breath to a gale // into other lungs. Indeed, these are poems whose witness transforms the breath; read them with a pen in hand. Fletcher exhumes truth from the saltwater-soaked soil of buried knowing and asks himself, and us: Do you remember how you felt / when your skin was open sky, / untilled plains, / clean and free / of headstones? I cannot wait for you to read this book.

–Darla Himeles, author of Cleave

Fletch Fletcher has utilized an intimate and soul shattering vehicle, the confessional, to transform the raw energy of life lived into poetry. “…it must be true first that confession is an energy before you / can understand how laws work…so I marked and measured and buried mine / let them seep slowly.” You are holding the book of a poet who feels to the very depths of his being; a poet who does the shadow work of digging and surfacing to write poetry that is ecstatic in its seeing.

–Roberto Carlos Garcia, author of What Can I Tell You? Selected Poems (Flowersong Press)