SUR

"Sur barely contains itself. Koehn packs this new collection with the thick sounds of hard syllables striking the earth, shaking it. I love the density of these poems, the depth of observation—so much here that rewards multiple readings. Koehn is inclusive yet precise in his noticing. He embraces incompletion and mystery, while also giving them room to breathe. These poems turn on their surprising intimacies. There are no consolation prizes to be had here, but sometimes there is consolation. And even, sometimes, love." -- Jim Daniels, author of "Digger’s Blues"
"Animated by 'the invention of song, people in pain,' Koehn’s Sur ventures us into meadows, deltas, all kinds of traffic and tax returns. Beloveds and creatures abound here. And wild grasses. A feast of peaty, alluvial soils. These irreverent poems interrogate the biggest ideas and the smallest. How do we love and injure? How do we 'shape the shore of the world from the boat'? How do we behold a spider web across a trail after a night of rain? Language meanders, dizzyingly, intelligently, and thinks. What complicity, what grief, what water? And when we put these mutinous poems down again, there they appear, in full relief: our harmful ways. Our gentle hands." -- Nathalie Khankan, author of "Quiet Orient Riot"
"Sur seamlessly plays sound and form with and against the speaker’s perception of the natural world. The poems rejoice in the landscape’s negative space, positing, 'What do we call the empty space between winter’s branches?' Koehn’s mystical speaker is constantly questing to name and not name liminal spaces, asking, 'Can the morning hold only one idea,/ Does uncertainty feel only one way?' Throughout these agile poems that deftly embody lists, incantations, and lyrical fragments, each engages the act of seeing as a sense of revelation and shape-shifting until the speaker prophesizes, 'You have become a thing concealed. A part of the kaleidoscope.'" -- Maria Nazos, author of "PULSE"