Lapis Moon

Christopher Brooks is an Okie speaking to and of home from a great Middle Eastern distance, even as he writes so beautifully about that great distance while he's there. And yet, when he's back here in the states, he gives us poems of the Southwest that feel as if they come from some other great distance. One that those who live here know but can't explain.

And he's got a message for those of us who are too much "back here" in the U. S. all the time. We need to listen to the dust and stones, the moons, and bones of these poems if we're ever going to find a way forward. Power-poems like "Blue Democracy" serve as a stark reminder of what we can't seem to figure out what we are losing in this country.

In poems from New Mexico to Afghanistan, Brooks makes the whole world a land of enchantment, mixed with the sad blessings and beautiful curses of a thoroughly lived life full of whiskey and Miller Williams, lipstick, and The Paris Review. This is a voice as gutsy as it is erudite, and it's one I hope the East Coast gods of poetry won't, yet again, gloss over because of where it comes from. A voice that answers the disingenuous question: What's wrong? "Looking down, I said, Poetry."

Nathan Brown, Poet Laureate of Oklahoma 2013-14 and author of Just Another Honeymoon in France: A Vagabond at Large

Lapis Moon closes the distances between Afghanistan and Oklahoma, ancient and modern, the tragic and the humorous, foreign policy and humble villagers trying to survive. In an honest, down-to-earth voice, Christopher Brooks delivers visually rich, intellectually incisive, and emotionally powerful poems about ordinary people living under extraordinary conditions. Here is a poet who understands military life and the souls of birds, machine-gun fire, and a young boy stacking sandbags.

Henry Hughes, Oregon Book Award-winning poet and professor of literature at Western Oregon University