Lookaftering by Ray Holmes

“By this did the spark arise,” writes Ray Cody Holmes in “Shenandoah Black Box,” the opening poem in his debut collection, Lookaftering. It’s an astonishing debut, in which small town life—a day saved by an ice cream sandwich, a snatched hatchet that costs a boy a finger, a house fire that somehow seeds the future—surrounds us with a wide world. Rural and sophisticated, with a gift at every turn, Lookaftering commands, and rewards, attention page after page. Holmes writes beautifully.

–Steven Schreiner, author of Belly, Too Soon to Leave, and Imposing Presence

The whole imaginative genome sequence of this beautiful debut collection sits encoded in its inventive title. Lookaftering is at once a looking-after, a caretaking that encapsulates Holmes’ patient attention to every inch of his surroundings. But it also evokes his careful consideration for how he crafts each luminous image, how even the slightest presence evokes an afterburn, a memory, a joyous haunting of the sacred space all objects take up in his world. One of the many unforgettable images in the book is a Chinese Lantern Festival’s pair of dragons composed of porcelain flatware, of plates and cups that link up into the sinuous skin of monsters. That’s the world these poems inhabit, one in which the everyday—with its keys and calendars, its lightbulbs and matchbooks—all intertwine and shimmer.  “Do not be afraid,” the poet reassures us. “See. Now I tighten the drawer knob / that flirts with detachment.” Holmes makes such unmistakable magic of the mundane, and with him as our gentle guide, we know we’ve nothing to fear.

—James D’Agostino, author of Slur Oeuvre and Weathermanic