Fort Lonesome

The poems in Fort Lonesome are like the love child of Conan the Barbarian and Marie Curie, or Charles Darwin and Xena: Warrior Princess-enormous in scope, brimming with grit and humor, and driven with pathos shaped by a world in crisis. Krcmarik’s is a truly twenty-first-century voice measuring the visceral blessings of marriage, fatherhood, and work against the worsening agonies of geopolitical collapse, the sixth mass extinction, ocean acidification, and rapid climate change. Poems that begin at the breakfast table are likely to end in the stars. And always in these poems, Life and Death are dancing to music indebted as much to jazz and classical as to metal and blues. Krcmarik’s third collection is in love with the Earth, with earthiness, the beginning of things, the end of things, and our bright, brief flicker in between.