ForeWord Book of the Year Awards finalist
鈥淭his meditation,鈥 writes Christopher Bolin in Ascension Theory,鈥渋s about appearing without motes between us: / it is practice for presenting oneself to God.鈥 Bolin鈥檚 stark and masterful debut collection records a deeply moving attempt to restore poetry to the possibilities of redemptive action. The physical and emotional landscapes of these poems, rendered with clear-eyed precision, are beyond the reaches of protection and consolation: tundra, frozen sea, barren woodlands, skies littered with satellite trash, fields marked by abandoned, makeshift shrines, sick rooms, vacant reaches that provide 鈥渘odes / in every direction // for sensing // the second coming.鈥
Bolin鈥檚 eye and mind are acutely tuned to the edges of broken objects and vistas, to the mysterious remnants out of which meaningful speech might be reconstituted. These poems unfold in a world of beautiful, crystalline absence, one that is nearly depopulated, as though encountered in the aftermath of an unnamed violence to the land and to the soul.
In poems of prodigious elegance and anxious control, Bolin evokes influences as various as Robert Frost, James Wright, Robert Hass, George Oppen, and Robert Creeley, while fashioning his own original and urgent idiom, one that both theorizes and tests the prospects of imaginative ascension, and finds 鈥渘ew locutions for referencing / sky.鈥
鈥淐hristopher Bolin has undertaken鈥攂eautifully and with immeasurable tact鈥攖he task of loving this world rightly and really. The task is endless, and he rejoices in it. The task is intricate, and his joy magnifies it in sublime detail. Ascension Theory is a lustrous book.鈥濃擠onald Revell, author, Tantivy
鈥淭he ravaged landscapes in Ascension Theory are suffused with speechlessness, isolation, and anonymity. Avalanches, vast tundras, birds, goods, and flags鈥攖hings are nearly dead and icing over, becoming symbols before they ever existed in themselves. Alert to injury and the need for connection, Bolin presents a secular way of life haunted by lost powers of religion, myth, labor, and heroic action. The tremendous authority of these poems comes from their capacity to witness dissolution and repair, to capture illumination in those last seconds before it vanishes again.鈥濃擩oanna Klink, author, Raptus
"In Ascension Theory, Christopher Bolin has written a postmodern pastoral that is absolutely mesmerizing. The poems are set deep in a wintry rural world that appears barely encroached by humans. Here, Bolin meditates on the stark absence of spiritual sustenance and how in the face of such absence, we construct our own ersatz apparitions as a means of survival. Each poem is economical, scored with a silence that sings as finely as Bolin's richly imagined lines. Ascension Theory is an ambitious and wondrous debut."鈥擟athy Park Hong, author, Engine Empire
Allowances
As when fruit trees blot the constellation鈥檚 head
and loose it鈥攖houghtless and blind鈥攖o assemble
itself
in the West;
as when the aviary nets itself, again;
as when they plant a single terrace at a time
to keep from losing light;
as when, under crows,
the shadows totter back and forth
through trash; as when the trash-fires crown
in 顿别肠别尘产别谤鈥檚 trash;
as when astral charts
include rescue flares鈥攁nd we are, so briefly,
who we are.
