Lost Songs & Last Chances

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This collection pulses with surprising turns and playful language. The complex weave of individual, highly readable pieces presents an invitation to the reader to absorb the book as greater than the sum of its parts. Personal and intimate, the words reach out and evoke the constraints of modern life soaring above them to reveal fissures of experience and perception where mysteries and wonder exist which may be considered, at a glance, merely ordinary.

REVIEWS

“[Chris Ransick] sees the perfect — and often heart-breaking — detail in the worlds his characters inhabit. In ordinary lives he views profound humanity and our deeply shared need to matter — to ourselves, to those we care about, to the great mystery of which we’re a part.”
—Russell Martin, author, Beethoven’s Hair

“I admire the unwavering imaginative persistence of this writer in his . . . fantastic story; pure, unironized narrative is one of the most endangered of poetic species now; this poem stays true to its mystery, with verve and dignity. Bravo.”
—Tony Hoagland, poet, What Narcissism Means to Me

“Following Richard Hugo as much as John Wesley Powell, Chris Ransick is an exacting cartographer of the West’s vast landscapes, physical and emotional, rendering them with such care you will agree with him, ‘This is where / you have always lived, no matter what they say’.”
—Jake Adam York, poet, A Murmuration of Starlings