Reflections from the Front Porch by Mike Gill

This collection of poetry and poetic prose holds a beautiful word-sketch of a continuing world that surrounds us despite a smearing cloud of pandemic.

Outside the boundaries of fear and lockdown, the narrator helps us escape to a parallel world where squirrels, foxes, maples and cicadas thrive with equal significance to the eyes that care to notice.

And, despite the boundaries for lockdown social revolutions take birth in the human world that keeps questioning the rights and wrongs, revising the old thoughts.

The question of solitude remains to be asked – When this will be all over will the recurring dream return?

–Tito Rajarshi Mukhopadhyay, author of multiple books including Plankton Dreams: What I Learned in Special Ed (Open Humanities Press)

Gill’s poems remind us how hope is a practice–a practice of the daily, the quotidian, the front porch. Part of this practice is learning how to notice and observe where national traumas intersect with individual ones. Reflections from the Front Porch implicates us because the collection refuses the convenience of looking away, of washing our hands of complicity. Gill invites us to think about how scale is felt and dangerous fantasies of distance, separation from what we think has no bearing on us but in fact actively constitutes our lives and our relations with others. And such relations are often non-human: mint, maple, cucumber beetles. Whole ecologies of hope, “beauty / in [their] lasting act[s].”

–Travis Chi Wing Lau, Assistant Professor of English at Kenyon College, author of Paring (Finishing Line Press)