Sinking City by Noah Renn

Our cellular providers can’t decide what’s more astonishing: a) fact-checking the dead are permitted one phone call they never use on a family member or friend b) fact-checking the living block half of those incoming rings–disconnect too many of the rest.  Noah Renn’s debut Sinking City is kind enough to leave us a message, a welcome continuous voicemail subscribers better archive.  We ought to save his words just to play back to ourselves during mainly flood, mostly sun, or all snow. Where we live should no longer be left out of how we live, or why we live. Renn’s poems remind us to revere location now because science foretells the sidewalk we mosey will someday soon form a wicked long barrier reef.  That’s far better than some dumb wall, but we’d sure miss the sidewalk.  We best answer hello or say goodbye to everybody passing as fast as we can, before we’re stuck with questionable roaming fees.  This collection helps us manage our own miscommunication.

–Jeffrey Hecker, author of Rumble Seat

There are those who will write of place from that idea of wonderment and expansion gained in passage or escape—the sights and sounds of the foreign drop into their poems as bright specks, or like pigeons noisily careening through the air over a piazza where tourists are busy aiming their cameras. Noah Renn writes of place, too, but from the vantage point of the native, born and bred; of someone who hails from a region along the coast that many predict might very well become the next Atlantis, in the rising crisis of climate change. “I was born by the river,” the poet declares; “[m]y children too.” The poems in Sinking City will reward readers with their quiet wisdom, and their unadorned chronicle of landscapes also familiar to us. Here are tunnels and bridges, shipyards, the sounds of coal trains floating over Pretty Lake in East Ocean View. Here are porches where mothers swing their babies on their laps; here are deadend streets and empty lots where skateboarders kick-flip along the Elizabeth River, and the unmistakable smell of hardtack seeps into your clothes. Here are the elements that build the steadfast faith of those who’ve come to learn “through flood and fire” that really, no matter where we are, the only things worth claiming are those that will remain long after “the floodgate fist bumps the bulkhead/ [and] the river still spills its fast love.”

–Luisa A. Igloria, author of The Buddha Wonders if She is Having a Mid-Life Crisis (Phoenicia Publishing, Montreal) and Ode to the Heart Smaller than a Pencil Eraser (2014 May Swenson Prize, Utah State University Press)