In Letting Go, David Poston marries poetic skill and spiritual awareness, weaving religion, faith, relationships, doctrines, and values into a tapestry of compelling poetry. The text shifts from easy-going to uncomfortable to downright defiant, even as Poston’s polite, intellectually stimulating approach declines to hide the dissonance he deftly commands.
These poems call for an immersion in the text on the page and the allusions that expand to what is said between the lines. In “Chuck Norris and Jesus,” knowing Borges’s story transmutes us from recognition to enlightenment. And the references in “Symptoms of Woke-ness in the White Male” are pivotal to comprehending the poem’s epiphanic power.
In contrast, the poem “Insomnia” distills our needs into one most pivotal:
… In this broken world
(Do you understand I want to scream this?)
it does not matter. You must turn, you must
embrace, you must hold on to each other.
There is no tomorrow, just this one long night…
Thus does Poston deliver the context and importance of letting go, for by doing so, you open the door to your better self and to others.
Anne M. Kaylor is the executive editor and publisher of Kakalak Anthology of Poets & Artists and the author of Floating a Full Boat and Unwilling to Laugh Alone.
The poems in Letting Go are works of striking juxtapositions which beget unexpected but compelling connections: between hell and North Korea and summer dusk in Alabama, church mice and the Host they nibble and baby names for children who die by violence, laundry and coyotes, Chuck Norris and a Jesus who walks the streets of Charlotte. Their close attention and exact observation allow them to imagine truly as toy velociraptors stalk toy lambs in a Nativity scene, as a ring for an oblivious spouse becomes “a small hole / wrapped in gold,” as the X-man who speaks all languages finds himself suddenly wordless. There are surprises and delights here for most readers-and the poems embody what they describe when they illuminate “the way words bring us / through suffering / to love.”
Catherine Carter, author of Larvae of the Nearest Stars
At a time when secularism reigns, and many are wary of intolerance cloaked as faith, David E. Poston asks us in Letting Go to re-examine the intersection between poetry and spirituality by challenging the politicization of compassion and empathy. “I stood there in the dark,” the poet tells us, “waiting for one more bright flowering I knew would never come.” Erudite in their breadth, these poems leap with surprising allusions that span Aldus Huxley to Lao Tzu, BB King to Chuck Norris, Christopher Hitchens to Mahatma Gandhi. This allows Poston to examine a wide variety of issues and urgent questions, and then, as good poetry does, leave us in silence, seeking our own answers.
A.E. Hines, author of Adam in the Garden
I love how Letting Go works as a series of secular sermons complete with verses and soundtracks. There is a playfulness here that skirts along the curt edges of the everyday experience. This is not the place to differentiate verse from chorus, the real from the make-believe; these poems are music, these poems are parable. And I’ll be damned if I didn’t see myself in a lot of these. I don’t know what that truly says about the collection, but I connected with it.
Ray McManus judged the Lena Shull Book Award Competition of the NC Poetry Society in 2022, author of The Last Saturday in America
I was mesmerized by the concision and depth of the poems in Letting Go, by David E. Poston. Right from the start, with the poem, “This Is,” David surprises, “This is the poem that hides behind itself / the poem that loves you.” Poston’s language is tailored phonically before the reader’s eye; the sounds are jointed and lubricated to slide past and collect momentum. As I entered one poem after another, I got caught up by the richness of tone and content-multitudes play on multitudes, unfolding and unveiling new dimensions.
Joseph Zaccardi served as Marin County Poet Laureate (2013-15), author of Songbirds of the Nine Rivers
There are poetry books that compel us to think and think and think. In Letting Go, poet David E. Poston’s poems do not yield any easy answers. Each poem is a fastball that we cannot dodge. Each poem reminds us of our shortcomings as humans. In a poem titled “Naming Your Baby,” we face a litany of names of those who were victims of violence-Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and Trayvon Martin, to name a few. Poston instructs us that “The baby books do not give meanings / for many of their / names” and ends the poem with lines that speak existentially for the volume as a whole: “the madness of us all / gnaws it [the heart] / bit by bit.”
Grace C. Ocasio is a former Gilbert-Chappell Distinguished Poet for the North Carolina Poetry Society, author of The Speed of Our Lives
David E. Poston’s
work has appeared in Cider Press Review, The MacGuffin, Pembroke, and many other journals and anthologies. His collection Postmodern Bourgeois Poetaster Blues won the North Carolina Writers’ Network’s Randall Jarrell Chapbook Competition. He is a former Kakalak editor, Pushcart Prize nominee, and recipient of awards from the Writers’ Workshop of Asheville, Charlotte Writers Club, and Southeastern Writers’ Association.