ROUTES BETWEEN RAINDROPS
​Dan Wiencek

“In Routes Between Raindrops, Dan Wiencek searches through
a feast of images . . . as they shift back and forth between the common and the uncanny, the probable and the impossible alike. Wiencek calls us to recognize ourselves, through shifting tones and approaches, from the recognizable, such as baking bread, to the absurd, as in coming home to find a walrus in a pile of laundry . . . It’s a marvelously dislocated tour that we exist in, and co-create, as Wiencek writes, ‘Sky throws itself in everyone’s / faces, now you’re me, it says.’”

—John Gallaher, author of In a Landscape


“With his slantwise existential wit and his sleight-of-hand association and indirection, Dan Wiencek takes us on ‘a hypothetical guided tour’ through various surreal landscapes all the way to the present moment where you can ‘realize you’re looking at a star, / the mirage that dissolves at the eye’s touch.’”  

—Claire Bateman, author of Coronology


“I love the way Wiencek perceives the world. Time and again, the speaker in his poems looks out to find it damaged but irresistible,
like a friend endlessly returning with some new self-made malady, asking you to love them anyway. And Wiencek does. With a wry, self-aware, and tender humor—the poems put me in mind at times of Tony Hoagland’s--the writer rescues moments from the blur and frames them beautifully: an empty lot ‘[stares] up at the sun like a vast / gravel eye,’; a hand grasps empty air like ‘a furnace / starved of flame.’” 

—Grady Chambers, author of North American Stadiums


70 pages | A5  5.83 x 8.27 in. | 2021
ISBN-13: 978-1-7338246-6-8 (paperback)
$15
Dan Wiencek is a poet, critic and humorist who lives in Portland, Oregon, and whose work has appeared in Sou’wester, New Ohio Review, Timberline Review and other publications. Routes Between Raindrops is his first collection of poems.
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