Before heaven will suffice, I go listening for a word,
Its oily meat, its newborn orbit. Come with me, now.
--From Inside Hell's Kitchen
As the son of a sailor who grew up on Lake Erie, J.P. White is given to
sudden violent storms and rough water that test and shape a man's grasp
on the living. No matter how far his poems travel--Russia, Bermuda,
Italy, the Dominican Republic, Germany, Mexico, France, New York City,
Africa--water is never far from the elemental current that feeds them.
As such, his poems are brightly lit with a searching out of islands,
distant cities, and those thin places where the truth of our wounds and
our wonder shine through.
The new poems in All Good Water speak convincingly about the death of
friends and family, the renewal of marriage, lost shoes, abandoned
children, and failed boats, as well as larger troubles in the torn
fabric of America and our historic obsessions with expansion and blood
purity.
In the last thirty-five years, J.P. White has published essays,
articles, fiction, reviews, interviews, and poetry in over a hundred
publications, including The Nation, The New Republic, the Los
Angeles Times Magazine, The Gettysburg Review, The American Poetry
Review, and Poetry. He is a graduate of New College in Sarasota,
Florida; Colorado State University; and the Vermont College of Fine
Arts. He is the author of four books of poems and the novel Every Boat
Turns South.
