Cold Storage

Poetry. The poems in COLD STORAGE are revelations in the fullest sense, uncovering a world at once familiar and rendered new again in resplendent, transformative detail: a halo on the threshing floor, a drop of water on the skin, the nearing dark. Keith Althaus is a poet who walks by the shadow yet thrills with his illuminations, producing lanterns from yucca blossoms, a last breath, or a plain hospital gown. Here, light is what surrounds a painting or frames a closed door, saturating both the landscape and the interior of the self until even darkness glows. With spare language and a painter’s eye, Althaus delivers poems that are intimate yet gorgeous, effortless yet intricate. This book marks the stunning return of one of America’s pure voices in poetry–we are grateful for the light he’s cast.

Cold Storage is filled with those enigmas so frequently found at the heart of the real. It possesses a shrewd, sad wonder at how and where we live, and a honed awareness that nothing is quite what it seems, people least of all. It is a book like no other at this crazed, ridiculous moment on our beautiful, sorrowing planet.–David Rivard