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9781952386077

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All these years later I still ponder it, / the mystery of evil, Luchs writes, and in a series of moving, brave, and honest poems speaks of childhoods feral grief, the cruelty of his fathers belt, of the stormtrooper in fur, Suzie, who would bite anyone. Never self-pitying, Luchs poems offer the earned wisdom that to forget would be to lose yourself / and everything that made you. Weathering Rudy, the neighbor who abhors dogs but operates a kennel, the man driving a red Mustang with abuse on his mind, and a father who plays Hitlers Inferno, Volumes 1 and 2 for Christmas has made Luchs a poet. Although he offers this advice: grow your own shell / and carry it with you always, Luchs removes his shell and translates experience into darkly quirky and deftly crafted poems. And then, the collection moves stunningly when Luchs is taken unawares by love. In one of the several beautiful love poems, we are tenderly told that whatever it is we believe we are doing, / we are always either falling to earth / or falling in the direction of up. / I will fall that way if you will fall with me, /and it occurs to me now that two hands / holding each other almost make a wing. I urge you to take this book in both hands and allow yourself to fall into it, to fall in love with it, to fall in the direction of up. Marion Starling Boyer, author of The Sea Was Never Far Kurt Luchs gives us the blown-out chambers of his heart in his new collection Falling in the Direction of Up. The poems are as muscular as they are graceful, packing a punch that leaves one breathless. They are wrenching and savage in their veracity. With language that is both familiar and surprising in imagery and turns of phrase, Luchs explores his life with a stick of dynamite instead of a flashlight. His personal history works its way into ones bones with a controlled, humming syntax. There is compulsion and hunger here, and a soft place, too, where a kind of silent wisdom finds itself grounded. Hold on tight when reading this collection, hold tight and then let go. Lenny DellaRocca, Founder, Co-Publisher, South Florida Poetry Journal

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Kurt Luchs was born in Cheektowaga, New York, grew up in Wheaton, Illinois, and has lived and worked all over the United States. After years of writing humor for the New Yorker, the Onion and McSweeney's Internet Tendency, among others, he returned to his first love, poetry, like a wounded animal crawling into its burrow to die. His most recent work includes FALLING IN THE DIRECTION OF UP (Sagging Meniscus Press, 2021). In 2017 Sagging Meniscus Press published his humor collection, IT'S FUNNY UNTIL SOMEONE LOSSES AN EYE (THEN IT'S REALLY FUNNY), which has since become an international non-bestseller. In 2019 his poetry chapbook One of These Things Is Not Like the Other was published by Finishing Line Press, and he won the Atlanta Review International Poetry Contest, proving that dreams can still come true and clerical errors can still happen.

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