“Empathy and wisdom are hallmarks of Chris Ransick’s poetry and nowhere is this more powerfully on display than is his collection, Temporary House. From the rising scent of a newly seeded garden bed, or the soaring commentary of a raven in the sky, to the broken wheel of a bicycle that has left behind by the abrupt flight of troubled neighbors, Chris examines a life and finds every life waiting for an acceptance, a landing, a home. I’ll read and re-read this book for years to come.”
- J. Diego Fry, author of Umbrellas or Else and The You the Eggs Cracked
In Joe the Ghost, Chris Ransick’s narrator speaks from what the Celts call the “thin place,” a world between corporeal and spirit. From his transcendental perspective, Joe fully inhabits his earthly body and its delights, yet simultaneously leaves them far behind. “Everyone is dying but only some / also live,” he tells us - a wisdom borne of both the poet’s tender care and brilliant craft. This is a soaring collection, the work of a master who left us at the pinnacle of his powers. These poems will continue to sing long after we, too, are out of time.”
- Joy Roulier Sawyer, author of Lifeguards and Tongues of Men and Angels
mummer, prisoner, scavenger, thief
mummer prisoner scavenger thief from Denver Poet Laureate and award-winning author Chris Ransick. It begins in the realm of the mummer whose masked performance conceals the self and transforms language to better evoke what is too risky to speak overtly. Ransick’s poems ply this tension between knowing and speaking in cadence and imagery that simultaneously disorients readers and beckons them forward.
Asleep Beneath the Hill of Dreams
These poems explore the often permeable membrane between conscious and subconscious worlds. From the narrow lanes of the Cimetière du Père-Lachaise to suburban alleys where laughing children sprout wings and fly away, the strange becomes familiar and the familiar, strange.
A Return to Emptiness
This collection of short fiction, a finalist for a Colorado Book Award in 2005, weaves disparate details of ordinary lives into stories unflinching in their realism. People go missing and lives teeter on the fulcrum of finding a kindred spirit, or losing one. Yet throughout, incidental humor flashes amid the pathos of everyday life, finally telling the overarching story of us all—the need to come to grips with our own isolation, and our need for one another.
Language for the Living and the Dead
"A splendid and moving collection. —David Yezzi
"The voice of these poems lives in myth and dream, and therefore holds the secrets of our deepest hopes and desires. Ransick knows how to beautifully turn a line, forging music and image into moments masterfully crafted—moments that contain the high and low, bird wing and cloud, screwballs and mud. These poems haunt, humor, and cajole, while moving me to higher ground. By which I mean to say they lift me up and give me a new perspective on what it is to be human."
—Michael Henry, author of No Stranger Than My Own
Lost Songs & Last Chances
Novel in its structure and broad in range of voice, this collection offers ten suites of varying music, length, depth, and tone. A pair of poems introduce each suite, an experiment in layers and pacing that ultimately binds the parts into a whole.
Never Summer
The acclaimed first collection won the 2002 Colorado Book Award for Poetry.
"To read the superb poetry of Chris Ransick is to step outside and take a deep breath of Colorado mountain air." —The Rocky Mountain News.