Jay Udall

"In often startling associative images, Jay Udall, "pure as dirt, cousing to weeds / and worms," negotiates the natural world, listening to tongues of rain and the language of wind, observing his surroundings with a clear, precise eye: "wasps were rare, exotic / how they dangled like earrigns in air." A political field guide, eco-conscious and craft wise, Reach Beyond Reach springs from a poet who praises each of the "100 billion ghost particles / Passing through my finger each second." You might wish this companionable book could fit into the back pocket of your jeans." --Michael Waters, author of Caw

"Jay Udall has has composed a book haunted by violence, killing, war, and nature’s own disasters, daring us not to look away, yet also offering at our most sunken depths ”a buoyancy from nowhere/ lifting, some gravity pulling up.” Amid “skin, scale, fur/ and feather,” through dirt and sky, although our species is “the kind who murder our own in schools and churches,” Udall teaches us to love and praise creation: “the living work, the thick and quick of it.” I am grateful for the precision and tenderness of this emerging poet. --Alicia Ostriker, author of Waiting for the Light

"Reminiscent of William Stafford, in their everyday mysticism and transpersonal dreaming, Jay Udall's poems open and open, like 'air, earth, skin: a door.' With pantheistic richness and generosity, Udall's poems are in dialogue with the gods of cockroach and catalpa, 'leaf lungs and sky,' all the 'wild messengers,' strange and stranger kin. The Welcome Table engages us in a project of gorgeous and insistent seeing and naming, 'telling the world' and listening, too--profoundly. This is a remarkable, radiant collection." --Paula McLain, author of Circling the Sun and Love and Ruin