NEW RED WORDS by Larry D. Thacker

Larry Thacker continues the journey of his restless and singular imagination with New Red Words, which opens with a simple but mind-blowing declaration: “Humanity is headed to Mars.” These poems take us into the stratosphere and beyond, and into the not very distant future, to find that once the scientists arrive to make Mars habitable, they soon realize that without poetry, the place feels unlivable. We follow a companionable unnamed poet as he prepares for departure, makes the trip, arrives, and discovers the mysteries and sorrows of life on Mars. In “When you’re thirsty, look to the horizon,” we are confronted with what we might miss most: “Think on how you once/ stood, ankle deep in the shoreline, looking/ for the wink of this red planet as a child.” Mars holds a permanent grip on the collective imaginary, and Thacker offers us speculative poetry in a new mode: part novel-in-verse study of characters and conflicts, part travelogue, part confessions of an interstellar wanderer. New Red Words is an irresistible invention of a book.

–Jesse Graves, author of Merciful Days and Tennessee Landscape with Blighted Pine

This is a wonderfully imagined book of poems, as expansive as the vast space it contemplates. One marvels at the banal duties and details belonging to life on Mars, the practical needs of staying alive while engineering a new idea of life. Imagining that someone in that new world will inevitably be called upon to write poetry is almost absurd, until these poems remind the reader that life without passion has little appeal. There is wonder here, wry humor, amazing scope, and plenty of pathos. Imagining life on Mars is nearly as beautiful and terrifying as imagining life on Earth.

–Maurice Manning, author of The Common Man, One Man’s Dark, and Railsplitter

“Larry Thacker‘s collection, New Red Words, is vibrant, alive, and wholly original. The real world falls away when we are in these pages, and we are transported to the land of luxuriant language and the unexpected.”

–Silas House, author of Lark Ascending and Southernmost