Stars and Sparrows Alike by Ryan Apple

A lovely chapbook, full of wise, startling, and tender moments.

–Tania Runyan, author of What Will Soon Take Place and Simple Weight.

Ryan Apple opens our eyes and ears. He enables us to hear the rhythm of a backyard trampoline as the source of “the tempo and time to all the songs of night;” and the “buzzing rasp” of his metal-keyed African mbira as echoing in its “ancient resonance, the tones from which all music was born.” Such lyricism serves well his narrative creations ― where we see through various eyes, including those of a biblical prostitute, a curious magazine-reader in a dental waiting room, and parents devastated by the death of an infant daughter. Ryan Apple’s poems are worth returning to again, and again.

–D.S. Martin, author of Ampersand, and Poet-in-Residence at McMaster Divinity College.

In Stars and Sparrows Alike, poet Ryan Apple connects the temporal with the infinite and maps with lyrical intensity the gravitational pull of both—from the coded language of DNA he beautifully renders in “Embryonic” where a husband and wife share the secret of a recently conceived child across a dinner table with just their facial gestures, the language of the body, to the merging of our bodies’ star-birthed elements with “a secret element/unperceived in the whole of the world” in an endgame Glory. In between, the quickness of youth is set against imagined “last days” where time is measured in the slow circuitry of a gold fish, but also where the former “raw power” of iconic rock anthems transcends even their reduction to “easy piano” and finds again moments of pure euphoria. Informed by his own musicianship, Apple approaches the “buzzing rasp” of this world with humility and an open eye and ear and gives voice in poem after poem to “the divine serenade … calling forth Let there be.”

–Dennis Hinrichsen, Poet Laureate Emeritus of the Greater Lansing Area and author of [q / lear] and Skin Music