Gary Lark
Ordinary Gravity

The haunting poems in ORDINARY GRAVITY drop you into a world of logging towns of western Oregon in the fifties and sixties—a way of life undergoing change—with forays into the small towns, the woods, and on the rivers. Gary Lark is a keen, elegiac witness to the people in this world and the generation marked by the Vietnam War, and their hard-won wisdom and ironies. These poems and people "enrich the thin life of this planet," as the title poem states. In life, one shouldn't presume too much, but there are gains—"All you have to do is brave the thorns."

Cover design: Beth Ford
ISBN: 978-0-9895799-8-8
Paperback: $16
Publication date: September 3, 2019

Gary Lark’s most recent collection is ORDINARY GRAVITY (Airlie Press, 2019). Other work includes River of Solace (Flowstone Press), Editor’s Choice Chapbook Award from Turtle Island Quarterly; In the House of Memory (BatCat Press); Without a Map (Wellstone Press); Getting By, winner of the Holland Prize from Logan House Press. Gary and his wife live in Oregon’s Rogue Valley.

Learn more about Gary’s work at his site.

Excerpt from Ordinary Gravity

Downstream

There were moments when I was fearless
moving down an unseen channel,
at home in the nameless water
that carried me.

Forgive me for not being able to say
where I was going. I didn’t know.
The stars reflected in dark pools
and I had to wade among them.