Reviews
Review by: William Wright, author of GRASS CHAPELS - May 18, 2022
"This is a beautiful collection. In poem after poem, David Armand recognizes the importance of the familial, the personal, and the ways in which memory lingers and creates new realities. The clarity of these poems, their unimpeded voice, reveals Armand's greatest strength: to tell stories and to tell them well. As in his fine novels, these poems resonate with aural lushness, but the sound never overwhelms the senses. Indeed, one gets the impression that a friend is present, recounting memories--a masterful raconteur whose poetic voice emanates with authenticity and even kindness. Armand's giftedness spans across genres: he is an excellent poet, one whose voice will sustain."
Review by: Robert Lee Kendrick, author of WHAT ONCE BURST WITH BRILLIANCE and WINTER SKIN - May 18, 2022
"These poems immerse the reader in the narrator's reckonings with what was given, and what was taken, by his father, a man who borrows his son's money for beer, challenges him to fist fights, tends a garden that yields more than they can eat, and mends broken things as best he can. In language that captures the rhythms of everyday speech, and line breaks that evoke both the dissonances and harmonies of memory, David Armand reveals the difficult beauty images that flicker with promise and sorrow. This book is suffused with gratitude, understanding, empathy, and loss."
Review by: Jack B. Bedell, author of COLOR ALL MAPS NEW and Poet Laureate of Louisiana, 2017-2019 - May 18, 2022
"Good poems bring us home with them for a spell. They build trust over time and share their experiences with us bit by bit. Great poems, though, feel like home from their first line on. David Armand offers the reader great poems. They are about fathers, and sons, and of a world so real you can smell piney woods and see steam rising off a newborn foal. The joys, and pains, of these poems are at once familial and universal, individual and metonymic. There's not much more you could ask a poem to do, not much more a poet could deliver, than what Armand gives us here."