Chuck Salmons
Surviving the Eremocene
by Chuck Salmons
ISBN: 978-1-962405-32-4
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chuck Salmons has served as a leader for the Ohio Poetry Association for more than a decade. His poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Chiron Review, The Fib Review, Evening Street Review, The Ekphrastic Review, Main Street Rag, Pudding Magazine, and I Thought I Heard a Cardinal Sing: Ohio’s Appalachian Voices. He has published three poetry collections: Stargazer Suite (11thour Press), Patch Job (NightBallet Press), and The Grace of Gazing Inward: Poems in Response to the Art of Alice Carpenter (Dos Madres Press). Chuck received a 2018 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award for poetry, and he performs with the poetry trio Concrete Wink. Find him at chucksalmons.com
ABOUT THE BOOK
In his fourth poetry collection, award-winning poet Chuck Salmons explores and expands upon the meaning of Eremocene, or Age of Loneliness, a term popularized by biologist and naturalist E.O. Wilson. Through thought-provoking poems, Salmons looks at the term as it applies to environmental concerns and beyond–loneliness as a condition resulting from family history, sociopolitical differences, scientific advances, and cultural touchstones. Through narrative poems full of rich details, humor, and wisdom, Salmons examines his own Ohio upbringing and sense of place in the Midwest as an immediate descendant of Appalachians. He invites readers to join him in this endeavor and perhaps come to their own understanding about how to determine one’s place in a world simultaneously fraught with disappointment and ripe with hope.
ADVANCE PRAISE
Chuck Salmons’ clear-eyed, clear-hearted poems show us how to survive in an age of loneliness and loss––when the sky can seem like a “blue scalp” or the nimbus clouds like a “broken shroud.” These poems resist despair by leaning into gratitude, savoring not only the perfect pleasures of a blood orange or a Cabernet with “tannins puckering our tastebuds,” but also the imperfect human lives we love: the grandmother who made biscuits as a child, standing “on an overturned dynamite box / brought home from the mines by her brothers;” the father who worked overtime to keep the tank full for family road trips, but could “let fly profane phrases / bluer than his ’77 Silverado;” the mother who, dining out with her son after chemo, toasts “the kind nurses / who hit her vein the first time, / every time.” These poems remind us––in their moving, well-honed, resonant lines––that even in a fallen and falling world, beauty and grace are constantly at hand.
––Lynn Powell, Season of the Second Thought
Surviving the Eremocene by Chuck Salmons is about memory as a tool for withstanding this or that dire time and refashioning the configurations of hope. Life as skill-building. In his poem “Merlot” Salmons lets us know that the whole world is always and forever at stake: “This night her appetite is strong, but we know it won’t matter / because with chemo / everything tastes metallic.” These days, we need poets to address the adversary, whether it be Death or the overly amplified politics of the moment. Because, as Salmons says, “Some opponents can’t be outrun.” These striking poems are also indicative of a need to rehearse our hopes: “I dreamed of hopping a box car / bound for the redwoods of Big Sur, / charging surf of Maine, or warm Gulf waters–– / anywhere but one-block-long Bruckner Road.” The poet wants us to dream with him. To recall a place of Ohio-singleness as a first step to deciding what we want to survive, and why, in the service of Seeing and Not Turning Away. In spellbindingly tenuous times, I embrace its vision, glad and grateful for poets like Chuck Salmons.
––Roy Bentley, finalist for the Miller Williams Poetry Prize for
Walking with Eve in the Loved City
Chuck Salmons writes of ordinary life—marriage, family, work—but finds ways to release tension, anger, and joy so that we come out in a new place that is both emotionally and aesthetically satisfying. His brilliance, for all his technical skill, is to give us a sense that we are all in this together, that he’s out there for all of us, figuring out how to make sense of muddled, disappointing, and sometimes glorious lives. We may not become better human beings after reading Surviving the Eremocene, but if not, the fault will be our own. Salmons offers us our chances, poem by compassionate, wise, and ironic poem.
––George Bilgere, author of Central Air
Chuck Salmons is a fine, fine poet with his feet firmly planted in the Midwest—even when his eyes are raised to the sky, even when he is physically far away. He brings together a love of science, and a love of the unknown, he mixes global headlines with neighborhood playgrounds, all with humility and tenderness for our complicated, conflicted country. In a series of deeply moving family poems, he examines the weight of limited possibilities, the compromised choices of working-class life. His rich imagery gives depth to the hard-earned emotions of these poems. They are memorable and heartfelt—readers will feel their own hearts responding in this age of loneliness, reminding us that ultimately, we are not alone, that we need each other to survive.
––Jim Daniels, author of An Arrogance of Trees
