Title: Flying over Sonny Liston
First published: 1996
Description: Winner of the Western States Book Award for poetry, Flying Over Sonny Liston explores with courage, compassion, and bone-deep wisdom the complicated and some times heartbreaking task of being human in the modern world, in the modern West. Whether he writes about the tortuous interior landscape of the family or the vast and often abused terrain of the Nevada desert, Gary Short is unfailingly honest, tender, and gifted with a vision for the all-revealing detail, the larger, wrenching truth.

Although many of the poems are about death or express a deep and painful anger, the book is about survival. We often find in these poems a movement from the dark into a blazing light of realization that acts as a counter to sorrow, from comprehension to forgiveness, and an awareness that the daunting challenge of being human is won not in loud victories but through the delicate graces of mercy, trust, and hope.
LC classification: PS3569.H588 F57 1996