Print: A Bookstore is proud to be working with Maine author Gibson Fay-LeBlanc in support of his forthcoming poetry collection, Deke Dangle Dive. All copies will be signed by the author and can be personalized - make sure to include your note in the checkout section!
What is a person to do upon finding out that his older brother has six months to live? What is a father to tell his young sons about the everyday violence, inequities, and injustices of the world? What is a husband to do when confronted with his domestic foibles and failings? What can poems possibly offer us in the face of unanswerable questions? Deke Dangle Dive explores illness, fatherhood, brotherhood, and masculinity through a variety of lenses, including ice hockey, contemporary culture, and the natural world. This unique collection considers how poems can speak to us and through us when all seems lost.
“I don’t know what to praise more, the vivid and bracing language of the poems in Deke Dangle Dive, or sense of life that language delivers, a life fully lived and examined in all its rich complexity. Hockey is, as one poem says, a way of ‘humbling yourself to the rules of the game’ and that also goes for the making of art, and beyond that the process Keats would call soul making, acknowledging the longing, love and grief that make us human. For Gibson Fay-Leblanc that involves exploring what it means to be a husband, father, son, and to confront the serious illness of a beloved brother. If the poet knows that the form ‘can never be close enough to the actual,’ still when poems are as beautifully made, as emotionally compelling as these are, they seem to pulse with life and pass that life on to us, through words that do indeed ‘land in the gut’ and ‘shiver the ribs.’”
— Betsy Sholl
Gibson Fay-LeBlanc is the author of Death of a Ventriloquist. His poems have appeared in Guernica, New Republic, Tin House, jubilat, FIELD, and the Literary Review. He currently serves as executive director of the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance and lives in Portland, Maine with his family