From My Family to Yours by Gary Beaumier

I’m over the moon with Gary Beaumier’s “From My Family to Yours.” This little family of poems, at once quirky and beloved, echo familiar thoughts I didn’t know I had.  And the sons and daughters, lovers and brothers soon felt like my own.  His poetry is that comfortable, that evocative and that universal. Each poem stops at just the right place, when I ache to read more and am pressed into imagining the rest.  His images are fresh and surprising, simple words that, when put together, say just the right thing.  “The tender of her wrists,” “cataract memory,” “blood beast,”  and “dented brown fedora” are little gem-phrases I won’t soon forget. That the poems seem effortless is a tribute to the restraint and craft of this poet. Equal parts accessible and surprising, Gary Beaumier’s poems will stay with me for a long, long time.

–Barbara M. Joosse, award-winning author of over forty children’s books, including I Love You The Purplest, Nugget and Darling, Old Robert and the Troubadour Cats, Evermore Dragon, and Lulu & Rocky in Milwaukee.

Before cell phones, live chats, e-mails, soldiers had a phrase – “Share the mail.” They were so hungry for news from home that their barrack-mates’ letters – though filled with people who were strangers to all but the recipient — somehow helped carry them back to where they wanted to be, to what was familiar. That is the way Gary Beaumier’s first book works. He writes vivid, fully imagined scenes until the clockwork of our life stands bare. We get jolted into primal, emotional landscapes. His vision is broad. Shifts of focus are deft so that each line imprints itself on the reader. The mark of poets worth their salt  is that they carry us forward, image by image. They rivet our attention. In “From My Family to Yours,” Gary Beaumier proves himself worthy of being counted in that company. This poet is well worth his salt.

–Ed Ruzicka, author of the poetry collection, Engines of Belief

Gary Beaumier‘s poetry collection “From My Family to Yours” describes the art of growing up, growing old, and eventually letting go. A shifting wind of family stories and historical moments, his poems address the relationships of fathers and sons, husbands and wives, brothers and friends in a language that is crisp and cloudless, as if spoken for the first time. The subjects of death, war, romance, and the past come up often, not as stopping points, but as passages. While these poems always teeter on the edge of what may have been — and may still be — a sad day, Gary Beaumier’s verses remind us that it is absolutely our task to create our own world.

–Erin Lewenauer, author of the poetry collection, Keeping Dead Things Around