AuthorsBookshop.com: The Moon Cracks Open

Meg Kearney, author of An Unkindness of Ravens:

�Here is a poet with a stolen quill in his hand and birdsong in his heart. Marc Beaudin�s poems dip and swerve and caw; if you listen closely enough, you might just begin to understand that the ache of the human heart can only be translated through the language of crows.�

Doug Peacock, author of Walking it Off and Grizzly Years:

�Beaudin delivers another fine collection of poems from the heartland. Like Roethke, the poems are rooted in the soil, sung from thickets and hooted in the night. Unlike Roethke, Beaudin reveals an incipient nomad�s soul with distant mountains tugging at his open heart. This book should best be read at the edge of a swamp or high on a wooded hillside. I haven�t enjoyed such singing since Jim Harrison came west.�

William Heyen, author of Crazy Horse in Stillness and Shoah Train, finalist for the National Book Award:

�There's an especially remarkable moment in Marc Beaudin's poem "River Music": He says, after floating in the Cheyenne River, "I hope that the toxins I have absorbed / will leave this river / some small part cleaner, // and will shine on my skin like a mirror." Not only does he want to sacrifice himself for the restoration of the primal but wants us to see ourselves in him, in the body of his work, in poetry itself. The Moon Cracks Open is spoken with such honesty and openness, and written with the blood of such a lyric eye, that we do.�

Mike Johnston, bassist with Faruq Z. Bey & the Northwoods Improvisors; host of "Destination Out" on WCMU Public Radio:

�Marc Beaudin's writing circumvents a world that revolves around technical perfection, a world that cannot keep the promises that it makes. Marc is part of an endangered species that never places a technical quality over an inner quality.�

Gina Myers, Lame House Press, editor of The Tiny:

"In 'The Things We've Lost (Branta Canadensis),' Beaudin, 'legs heavy with memory,' writes:

And more and more,
life seems to be a series of things lost;
like a leaking bucket that's carried
from a well up a long, meandering trail
till finally, we're home, with only a few drops
to sustain us.

But somehow, that's enough.

These few drops, the memories that exist in place of the past, that fill the absence left by loved ones now deceased and occupy the space of the lover now gone, are the stuff these poems are made of. The lesson being that it is not what was lost that is important, but that which remains. It may seem like little left in the bucket in comparison to what had once been there, but somehow it is enough. Enough to sustain us. For this is not a mournful poetry, but a poetry of life. A delight in and a celebration of life."