Satellite View by Lance Newman

In Newman’s poems, we wander, worry, and wonder while “little silences hum between the big ones.” We touch down on “sun-stunned cement” and the “cadastral grid of roads” to look around, to notice the prattling trucks, the power stations, the bush fires, the grave hucksters, the sprinklers. “I can’t find my balance in the talus,” says one speaker. “We’re bored as janitors bleaching old grout,” says another. And we are anxious too—about what it means to expand and explode our way into the future and away from each other; away from luna moths, gazelles, and coyotes; away from cactus and redbuds. In some ways, we are asked to confront our own fears, to interrogate our own complicity in climate change and immigration injustice. In some ways, the future “looks like real war.” But there is plenty of hope and beauty in these poems, too. If you are quiet, you can still hear the smallest among us: “For fifteen shining minutes / at dawn, you can hear pigeons preening.”

–Ashley Seitz Kramer, author of Museum of Distance

“It’s all uphill to Paradise / and all the talk is dark. / Who persecuted who. / What we did and didn’t do”—these are the lines that end the poem “Another Albuquerque Job,” in Lance Newman’s bracing, dense and tactile collection Satellite View. The diction is sharp in these spare, honed poems; they name the highways, the weeds, the demolitions, the detritus of the world at this moment, and also its heartbreaking beauties: “Five black-throated sparrows whistle in the smoke trees” (from “Anza Borrego), and “(a) luna moth drinks water from my cup.” These are poems with a haunting precision.

–Lisa Bickmore, Utah State Poet Laureate