If Life Is Love

As Confucius writes, We have two lives, and the second begins when we realize we only have one. Chuck Madansky's intelligent, poignant and sensitive second collection, If Life Is Love, embodies this adage. The speaker's cardiologist tells him he's due to die in five years. Though that knowledge causes fear and trembling, it makes for heartfelt poems of deep attention and appreciation-clear-eyed poems that understand the suffering of the world but choose to privilege our lonely hope. These poems thrum with gratitude; they comfort and illuminate. Madansky deftly connects Aristotle and Oreos, Pandora and Goldilocks. And perhaps, in the end, it is the simplest experiences that teach us how to live. Here is what I know: this morning / the fog would not leave the pond / until almost noon. By then, our dog / had led me through the woods / bathed in mud, rank and happy.

-Jennifer Franklin, author of If Some God Shakes Your House.

Chuck Madansky's latest book of poetry will draw you in, poem by poem, and leave you with a core choice: to perceive new associations and connections outside of your habitual framework of reality, or to cling to the comfort of your own small story, in love with what's in the way / of love in you. Through twists and turns that are funny and sad and immensely beautiful and deeply profound, Chuck invites us off the threshold to take a swim with him out into the expansive field of infinite possibilities. What a gift!

-Xochitl Hazel Trout, curator of Wild Words: Ferociously Nourishing Poetry.

In language that is rich, resonant and full of acutely observed detail about the natural world and our human part of it, Madansky's collection is a praise song to all of life, which holds so much to love, so much to grieve. He says I tilt toward the single blade / of grass, spring-born / forcing its way / through heart rubble. Here, as in other poems, the heart is a central image, the literal failing heart muscle, and the metaphorical heart, failing to love fully. In these poems, death is not the end of life, but part of the cycle that leads back to life. These are poems we can return to in times of despair, not because Madansky denies despair, but because we are invited on the poet's journey to see and love all of life.

-Lucile Burt, author of The Cone of Uncertainty.