Lost Songs & Last Chances

In his follow-up collection to Colorado Book Award winning Never Summer, Chris Ransick explores new terrain as far flung as Snowdonia in northern Wales, Manhattan’s Central Park, and the Black Canyon of the Gunnison closer to his home in Colorado. The book’s unique structure—a sequence of ten suites with intervening transitional poems—manifests the music of the title and includes “Suite for an American Boyhood,” “Albion Suite,” and “Suite for Lost Friends.” The poems range across a charged emotional landscape, witnessing both the natural world and the urban, challenging readers to see beneath surfaces for the signs  of our own connection.

Here is some advance praise for the collection:

With sweeping range in both subject and form, Chris Ransick invites us into his Lost Songs and Last Chances with a confident voice that is sometimes intimate, other times humorous, and always candid.  These are clear-sighted, engaging poems, the work of a writer with a sharp eye and an ear tuned to “the river’s full-throated song.”

Albert Garcia, author of Skunk Talk

The voice in Lost Songs & Last pulses with surprising turns and a deep mystical playfulness with language, offering songs meditative, rich, and keenly aware of the power of silence and observation. Ransick’s poems bring us elegies for the land, for loved ones, for the west and its diverse peoples and histories, offering a balm for our own losses. Wry humor mixes with uncanny wisdom, deep lyrical waters to nourish us in our fragility, our own place in a seemingly contradictory natural world. Poems about boyhood, youthful adventure, old age, war, and survival echo in a voice that asks, "What voice could join these harmonies and last as long as water and wind?" So we too dive deep into our nameless vanishing, to the bottom of the ocean with Ransick in this ambitious collection that heals with a lively movement from lamentation to praise.

Sheryl Luna, author of Pity the Drowned Horses

These are good poems, but they’re also good stories. They swim in a deep pool of experience and the leaps you make in and out of the water embolden your spirit. You'll want more of these dramas, ones you sometimes recognize, yes, but dressed up—lyric negligees spun like alpaca fleece from the weavings of a father, husband, and free-thinking mime of the wildly imaginable moment.

Art Goodtimes, author of  As If The World Really Mattered