CRIES, THE MIDNIGHT SKY (paperback)

Daniel J Flosi sometimes thinks they are an apparition living in a half-acre coffin within the V of the Mississippi and Rock Rivers. Daniel is a poetry reader at Five South, and is the founder/EiC of Black Stone / White Stone. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Funicular Magazine, Olney Magazine, Rejection Letters, Feral Poetry, and many more. Drop a line: @muckermaffic.

“‘Cries, the Midnight Sky’ traverses a lush and restless landscape inhabited by an old dog, rust on a silo, and the ghost of a grandfather who waits impatiently for the tomatoes to ripen. Here is a vivid, down-home ecopoetic where regret and hope grow as forsythia. Daniel J Flosi expertly explores the push and pull of unchecked life and its eventual decay. Flosi’s poems survey the cycle of dormancy and abundance; of the waiting for meaning, like a sleeping seed, and a love so radiant it’s almost too beautiful to take.” 

— Terri Linn Davis 

“Daniel’s poetic debut reveals a poet arrived at an estival reckoning, and we, the readers, are invited into the swelter. We are more than curious witnesses; we experience the collection’s revelations as they occur on the page. Minds privileged to peel the laminous layers of the motifs, themes at our leisure. A pleasure. i am eager to reconsider spiders erupting, as a boil of sea turtle hatchlings, from an ear. i can hear, too, the drone of cicadas sizzling incessantly. Am i, are you, at home in such noise, or unsettled by it. No matter how Sirius, or serious, is the Rising, the discovery will be all noisy heat.” 

— Shine Ballard, the fainéantmanqué 

“Modernist poetry is contemporized in ‘Cries, the Midnight Sky.’ Flosi reminds us in his stylistic modes that often to move forward, we must look back. Reading this collection gave me an invigorating thrill, the knowledge that my own favorite type of poetry is still being produced in such high caliber.” 

— Carson Pytell, author of “A Little Smaller Than the Final Quark”