Rick Christiansen

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Observations From the Well
by Rick Christiansen

ISBN: 978-1-962405-95-9
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Rick Christiansen is the author of Bone Fragments (2024) and Not a Hero (2025), Spartan Press. His work has received two 2025 Pushcart Prize nominations. He was a finalist for the RHINO Poetry 2025 Founders Prize and is featured in their 50th Anniversary Edition. He is a jury-selected finalist for the 2025 Rhysling Award and will be published in their 2026 Annual. His poems can be found in North American Review, RHINO, Thimble, Pennsylvania English, Anti-Heroin Chic, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Sheila-Na-Gig online, along with many other journals and publications. His poems explore survival, memory, class, and the residue of violence. He lives in Kansas City with his wife Kim and his dog B.

ABOUT THE BOOK:

Observations from the Well explores what it means to remain attentive in a world shaped by violence, grief, displacement, memory, and love. Moving from public tragedies to intimate moments of family, friendship, aging, and everyday kindness, these poems ask how we bear witness to one another without turning away. The collection examines the lives we inherit, the losses we carry, and the quiet acts of care that allow us to endure. At its heart, Observations from the Well is a meditation on compassion, resilience, and the sustaining power of paying close attention.

ADVANCE PRAISE:

I paused several times while reading Observations from the Well to admire its apparent and astonishing craft; to grapple with what the poems acknowledge, mourn, and celebrate; and to breathe in and through what feelings it provoked. Christiansen dedicates the book to Walter Bargen, “who taught [him] to listen more carefully.” How fortunate we are that this learned care, so evident in these poems, passes on to us through them.

––Jennifer Browne, author of American Crow
Director, Center for Literary Arts, Frostburg State University

In Observations from the Well, Rick Christiansen doesn’t shirk from his task of describing history’s darkness, even that dark history we encounter on the evening news. More importantly, though, Christiansen writes about those human beings who resist history, the father who saves a dog from a fire, the poet’s friends who prepare meals that sustain him, and the wife whose unexpected presence in his life answers, with holding, “entropy’s long argument.” Against his own skepticism, Christiansen knows he has arrived “late and lucky” at this moment in his life, and when we read Observations from the Well, we are aware how lucky we are that Christiansen’s poems exist to illumine our lives. This is the kind of book that reminds us why we read poetry.

––George Franklin, author of A Man Made of Stories

Secret channels of energy surge through each Rick Christiansen poem. Sticky truth, in-hiding, lingers just out of sight, waiting to overflow and be known through his pacing and capture. This is how he is becoming a trusted and unforgettable voice in American contemporary literature. His tone moves through tragedy and grief without window-dressing. His unique rhythms dive headfirst into emotion. He awakens us to existing wounds and old scars, as his empathy for the entrapped creates transformational resolve. In this collection, he carefully cracks open the human specific and whispers, revealing the totality: Here. Look at this.

––Holly Hunt, Poet, Essayist, Short Fiction Writer, and Prose Editor for Action, Spectacle