Ghosts of the Monadnock Wolves

This new volume of poetry from National Book Award Finalist Andrew Krivak explores in supple and often terrifying lines the breathtaking landscapes of memory and the natural world for which his fiction is celebrated. From the Pennsylvania coal mines to the fields and mountainsides of New Hampshire, these poems search for order in a father's everyday work, the changing seasons, and the myths that shape America and its people. Ghosts of the Monadnock Wolves is a poetic study in what we have lost, and what we still hold on to. A meditation in verse that deepens with each read.

Advance Praise for Ghosts of the Monadnock Wolves

Here in these powerful new poems that make up Ghosts of the Monadnock Wolves, Andrew Krivak presents those haunting, scintillant images he gave us earlier in The Signal Flame and The Bear: A wilderness drumming in the shadows of the Monadnock range, with its unforgiving ice, its Dantesque slopes, and the howl of those ghost wolves and coyotes. In the end, it's a father's hope to somehow protect one's children against those nightmarish forces we know are beyond our control.

Paul Mariani, author of Crossing Cocytus and The Great Wheel

Andrew Krivak's collection, Ghosts of the Monadnock Wolves, celebrates the history of a place in the only way that matters - by giving us the people of the place. In "Lake Ice," there's a passage that suggests his method of poetic exploration: The narrator and his children stand on a frozen lake and watch the "auger as it turns and searches, turns and searches through each frozen layer, until water so green and cold it looks oily gushes up and settles into slush around our boots." Krivak's close eye for the sensory detail grounds all of these poems, and the work reminds me of Harry Humes and the early poems of James Dickey. Reader, get ready to be immersed, get ready to learn what the auger can find.

Charles Rafferty, author of A Cluster of Noisy Planets