Red Obsidian: New and Selected PoemsPaperback, 13 March 2021

A visceral new collection from esteemed poet Stephen Torre, grappling with the strength and complexities of life in the northwest wild lands

Drawing from a life lived well, amidst hard work and time for reflection in the northwest wild lands of the Canadian and American Wests, Stephen Torre returns to the literary world with his usual descriptive and lyric intensity. Comprised of new and selected poems, Red Obsidian explores the necessary tensions that arise between genders and the pain and grief of environmental loss.

Inspired and influenced by a diverse array of literary influences--Indigenous oral poets and English pastoral poets, T'ang Dynasty Chinese poets and Latin American poets, American Imagists and poets Theodore Roethke, James Wright, and W.S. Merwin--Torre's book is a poetic journal of a man passionately engaged at once with the marvel of wilderness and the rural labors of family homesteading, construction, and the logging of that wilderness.

"When there's more joy or grief or hunger for knowing than I could express or explore elsewhere, I'm afflicted with the need to squeeze language from my fists. One can only hold so much inside," admits Torre. Readers will feel the torque, squeeze, and pull in these poems.