Lane Falcon

Coming Soon!

Deep, Blue Odds
by Lane Falcon

ISBN: 9781962405546
$16.00 (+ $4.63 US Shipping)

Also available upon release as an Ebook from online retailers: Ebook ISBN: 978-1-962405-51-5

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Lane Falcon’s poems have been published in American Poetry Journal, The Carolina Quarterly, Cream City Review, Harbor Review, The Healing Muse, The Journal, Medmic, New York Quarterly, Poet Lore, Rhino, Rust & Moth, Sheila-Na-Gig online, Spoon River Poetry Review, Swwim Everyday, Tar River Poetry, and more. Deep, Blue Odds, was a finalist for the Black Lawrence Press Hudson Prize, and a semi-finalist for the 2022 Tupelo Press Berkshire Prize.

ABOUT THE BOOK:

Lane Falcon’s Deep, Blue Odds traces a mother’s passage through her child’s life-threatening illness— from shock and grief to acute determination and the unexpected acceptance of a profoundly altered life. These poems often step outside of themselves, leaning on symbol and abstraction to convey the mother’s devastation, yet always returning to a stark emotional truth. Through an emergency tracheotomy, code blues, and repeated failed airway reconstructions, this collection searches urgently for meaning in the deepest fissures of life. And, in that depth, heartbreak meets breathtaking treasures, as grace turns doubt into faith, desperation into surrender, and fear into fathomless love.

ADVANCE PRAISE:

Lane Falcon’s Deep, Blue Odds focuses the attention on the wailful choir of the fragility of early life. These poems speak of the urgency of being born: the risks and dangers of being born at odds with a healthy body, at odds with the world, and needing extreme intervention and care in infancy. The complexity of how delicate babies are, and what it means to be a family is renewed in poem after poem. With unblinking ferocity, Falcon maximizes the vertical tension of the line with the horizontal tension of the sentence with pulse and precision.

––Sean Singer, author of Discography, winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition
and the Norma Farber First Book Award in 2001

Lane Falcon’s Deep, Blue Odds takes us into a mother’s surveillance of and perseverance and love for her children, her son’s first few years of life challenged as “He arrives / in a mold too small to hold / this cosmic injury”: his paralyzed airway. Striking imagery and surprising metaphor flourish as we are drawn further into Falcon’s poetic narrative of illness, medical necessity, and hope for a family not ready to give up as they live “inside an eye— / the cornea receiving dull, / morning light.” And illness meets faith as mother speaker grapples with how long it will take for her son to breathe on his own and speak, for her daughter to forgive herself for not being the superhero who could cure her brother, and for all of them to learn how to thrive even though they live amid the most astounding odds. 

––Theresa Senato Edwards, author of Becoming Couldn’t Sing for Anyone