Salt Pier (Pitt Poetry Series)
"Salt Pier is just full of energy--were the poems longer, they would feel like a full soccer match played with no half-time, such is the energy they carry. Some poems, such as "Ward", feel long despite their economy. Some invite outside references while others are properly self-contained in their own little frames. Always, what he is doing is something both humble and bold."--Coal Hill Review"Rarely is a book of poems quite so formally consistent.  ... There's a consistency of strategy too.  A brief narrative or anecdote (often about an encounter with an animal), is spiced with strange, sometimes dark, statements about the human condition.... There's something mythic and aboriginal about all this -- animal encounters as symbolic -- but the poems feel entirely contemporary in their form and diction and also in their concerns.... [C]ompelling and haunting."--Magma(UK)"There is a precision of phrasing and observation in Dore  Kiesselbach's poems, a sense of syntax, syllable, and detail (as in  Marianne Moore) as a single sinuous creation."—Antioch Review[Kiesselbach's] an opera singer who holds a note without becoming    breathless. Kiesselbach has a stunning way to make the poetic phrase    change meaning, and make better each line before and after. A trope that    depends on synchronicity is not achieved/arranged by accident. His    poetry is filled with green growing things, animals, nature's    observances—and because of line lengths—a constant tension."—Washington Independent Review of Books“Poems often use a single image—meticulously described and most often  from nature—as entry point to more profound territory. . . .  [Kiesselbach's] language is compressed; sentences compacted by a  geologic pressure to remove unnecessary words, leaving only the most  apt.”—Minneapolis Star-Tribune“If ‘Salt Pier’ is, in part, a study of the irredeemable, it is  also  an acknowledgement of the earthly redemptions almost slipping out  of  reach. That touch is possible is the affirmation—a tenderness too   resilient to recant.”—Cloudbank“[F]ascinating….Kiesselbach is…capable of bringing dark comedy into his investigations of the everyday….His knowingly clichéd treatment of otherwise neglected subjects, on the other hand, reinforces suspicions about the effect of presentation and the importance of engaging critically with the familiar.”—Manchester Review“Dore Kiesselbach’s poems reveal the particularity and/or  strangeness of   the commonplace—but many good poems do that. What  strikes me about  his,  though, are the ways that visual imagery,  diction, and cadence are   modulated to fit his subjects. Thus in ‘Rake’  the inanimate object   speaks (as in an Anglo-Saxon kenning) to  describe the way it touches   ‘death / that life may be revealed / in  green stupidity . . . fluent /   as underwater hair.’ In ‘Hickey,’ a  diver swimming among stingrays asks,   ‘How long does it take us / in  water sunlight permeates / to forget   needing ever to be told?’;  the  unusual diction suggests both the   speaker’s suspension in water as  well as his apprehension of joy. The   reader may hear faint echoes of  Hopkins or the early Dylan Thomas, but   the language is Kiesselbach’s  own.”—Ed Ochester“As the diver beholds ‘a moon dissolved in salt,’ so we behold the world    transformed in these elegant, rigorous, unsparing poems by Dore    Kiesselbach.  With the problem-solving logic of syntax, a turkey falls    dead from a tree, the duelist’s bullet turns a pocket watch to  shrapnel,   a stepfather works his world of harm. Morally acute and  musically   distillate, this is a book to celebrate.”—Linda Gregerson“I have followed, with pleasure, Dore Kiesselbach’s sinuous  poems for   several years. Some of them remind me of pythons wrapped  around a tree   limb above a riverbank. Those make me nervous. Others  remind me of a   favorite shirt, a shirt one will never relinquish,  never. His poems,   each one a tiny defibrillator, are a wonder.”—Thomas Lux