Mad River

Justin Bigos’ Mad River is a wide-eyed, sensitive, haunted book of poems–one so delicately and lovingly descriptive and incanted, it’s nearly miraculous in the clarity of vision it achieves regarding so much that’s unclear, so much seen through its mad river water. Every poem here is a portrait, a lamentation, a meditation, an elegiac commingling of lives into life–and death–the homeless father with mad John Clare, the preacher with the river, the son with the scripture, the birds in the air with a feral cat darkness. This book does not look away. It leaves nothing out. To write this little note in loving support of it, I am leaving everything out; this book is too big and too much–ecstatic, cathartic, troubling and blessed. And yet, the trouble in its heart is worth every second you spend in the throes of it. These are astonishing and unforgettable poems, poems of loneliness and mercy, of violence and grace. Justin Bigos has written here one of the best books of poetry I’ve read in a very long time–monumental, memorial, and alive!

-Matt Hart