John Repp
Never Far From the Egg Harbor Ice House
by John Repp
ISBN: 978-1-962405-50-8
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Also available upon release as an Ebook from online retailers: Ebook ISBN: 978-1-962405-51-5
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John reads from the book for Poets Know It: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Q8CKwntC2w
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
John Repp is a writer, folk photographer, and digital collagist living in Erie, Pennsylvania. He grew up along the Blackwater Branch of the Maurice River in the Pine Barrens region of southern New Jersey, a time and place that has nourished his artistic practice for fifty years. His twenty books and chapbooks of poetry and fiction include The Soul of Rock & Roll: Poems Acoustic, Electric & Remixed, 1980-2020 (Broadstone Books); Fat Jersey Blues, winner of the Akron Poetry Prize from the University of Akron Press; and Thirst Like This, winner of the Devins Award from the University of Missouri Press. Repp’s website features much more information about his work, influences, and obsessions: http://www.johnreppwriter.com.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Rooted in the rich loam of a mythic southern New Jersey, Never Far From the Egg Harbor Ice House collects thirty-six poems that conjure times, places, characters, cultural obscurities, and blunt facts. Form, rhetoric, rhythm, music, and imagery occur in great variety: Brief lyrics; serpentine narratives; demotic odes; polemics; elegies; and more. Before they wind to a close, some of the poems quarrel with, despair of, and revel in the “I” at their cores, even as other pronouns jostle for attention. The book offers no false reassurances or easy epiphanies, instead embodying ambiguity in all its richness. With their every syllable, these poems say “Listen!”
ADVANCE PRAISE:
As you can tell from its title, John Repp’s new collection is a feast for readers who feel the hyper-loadedness of life. There may be more variety of nouns in this book than in any other book of poems; one typical sentence includes sublimity, leaf piles, silhouettes, highway, Santini’s Lunch, air strip, crop-dusters, biplanes, flautist, Symphony Hall, tarps. Repp’s elegiac energy builds a world of memories he cherishes with such charm that the reader cherishes them too.
––Mark Halliday, author of Living Name: Essays on American Poets
I could enthuse all day over John Repp’s deft ability to make music out of our casual American English (“the smoke of zapped bees/curls above the workers whacking buckets of orange balls/into the weedy heat”). But then I couldn’t get around to his epigrammatic power (“Spirochetes/are sometimes the price/of ecstasy”) and his canny choosing of just-the-right-words for his details (“the trout’s mildewed tail,” “the silken sluice of milk in the morning”) and his empathy for blue-collar (or brokenly lower-down) seamy, steamy love and strife. These poems want to mix it up at the Whippy Dip, the Korean market up Broadway, Vince’s Auto, the Woodstown Diner where Tina heaps up the fries, and the Maplewood on Dyke Night. Go ahead, step in, the poems and their people are waiting for you: “The door between the worlds has always stood open.”
––Albert Goldbarth, two-time recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry
