It’s a magical feeling to have some of your absolute favorite writers blurb your work! Please click on the links on their names and check out their books. You’ll be glad you did.
“Marc Beaudin brings a practice of acute attention to our world, fueled by a poet’s diet of strong coffee, classic jazz, last call, wild huckleberries, and dreams of potato soup. The best poems in These Creatures of a Day vault over the “fear-white fence” of modern America and help us do what needs doing: wake up.”
—Joseph Bednarik, editor of Jim Harrison: Complete Poems
“Marc Beaudin’s new book brought tears in two poems flat. It happened when an evocation of the Yellowstone River immersed me in so much beauty even as the light failed and wind turned frigid that, when the poet found a heart-shaped stone, opened his coat and shirt, and held the stone to his bare chest as he vowed to spend what life he has left breathing in time to his home river’s stones, I found myself on my home river doing the same. But Beaudin doesn’t summon the same emotions twice in succession. His signature move is to create narrative pull via total unpredictability, following hilarity with nature’s or culture’s rape, or deeply grounded knowledge with the blithely surreal, or laugh-out-loud stanzas with heart crushers that blindside at the same time they mesmerize. In defiance of the darkness of our time, These Creatures of a Day left me feeling that a shock of hope could smite me from any direction around life’s next blind corner.”
—David James Duncan, author of The River Why, The Brothers K, and Sun House
“Relationships with all things illuminate These Creatures of a Day. Sit with this book a while. Beaudin is the rare poet, a peculiar visionary, who can extract both humility and hilarity from the everyday. In this wonder collection, he casts out a lifeline to the world.”
—Debra Magpie Earling, author of Perma Red and The Lost Journals of Sacajewea
“Beaudin is a poet existing on the knife-edge of the sacred and the profane. These poems rise up out of the natural world, the wings and the sky and the brittle trees. Beaudin’s eye takes it all in, honors this world as it is, while at the same time his soul transforms it. And in that transformation he consistently finds, and offers up, a type of joy.”
—Nick Flynn, author of Low: Poems, This Is the Night Our House Will Catch Fire and Another Bullshit Night in Suck City
“These Creatures of a Day is a talisman against the mundane. It is a spell book for enchanting wild people, places, and beings with understanding, attention, reverence. These poems stick in the heart the way a laugh escapes the throat—energetically. Marc Beaudin’s work is as brilliant as it is important. He is one of our finest nature poets, and his writing—pure, authentic, and timely—is a call to humanity, a nod to ancestors, and a pure joy to read. Add this collection to your bedstand, your bookcase, and your backpack. Carry Beaudin along with you as a nostrum, a paper folded bird of hope for a planet seeking these songs.”
—CMarie Fuhrman, author of Camped Beneath the Dam: Poems, and co-editor of Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, and Poetry and Native Voices: Indigenous Poetry, Craft, and Conversations
“In his poem ‘Depot Ghazal,’ Marc Beaudin writes, ‘If I hold this pen long enough, stare continually / out this window, eventually something’s got to give.’ Between the covers of this lyrical collection, we’ve got the proof of a hard-won exploration, the footprints of a guy who’s been to the edge and made it back more or less in one piece, the precise, closely observed reflections of a human heart, as Faulkner said, in conflict with itself. As far as I’m concerned, the more people who read this one, the better.”
—Allen Morris Jones, author of Mumblecusser: and Other Poems, Last Year’s River and A Quiet Place of Violence: Hunting and Ethics in the Missouri River Breaks
Marc Beaudin 