About this item
With an unwavering ascendancy of the austere, Thom Caraway's What the Sky Lacks explores the negative capability of uncertainties and mysteries in a landscape of ruthless severity and elusive beauty, "a world built of unknown language." While witnessing the stark refuge of cottonwood shelterbelts on a field's ragged periphery, listening to the tender weight of empty freight cars rolling through the night, or recounting the dream of a wrecker wherein human warmth exists only in the transient sounds of strangers, a soul transforms into "an instrument of pure light, a circular machine of illumination." The spiritual discipline of recognizing beauty in a world of desolation emerges sheer, unadorned as the rugged territories in the northern badlands obliterated by merciless blizzards, unburnished yet dazzlingly beatific in wintry ruminations of a faith weathered out of wreckage.
About the Author
I'm a poet, editor, publisher, letterpress printer, and professor, living in Spokane, Washington. I teach editing, book design, and creative writing at Whitworth University. What the Sky Lacks is an amalgamation of poems written in Spokane and North Dakota.
