Collected Short Poems

by J. R. Solonche
Introduction by Amanda Holmes Duffy

Print (softcover): $32.95
 

To pay by check please use this order form.

We are pleased to take orders from retailers. Email us with details about your order or call us at 207-837-5760.

This collection spans ten years—2015 to 2025—of Solonche's short poems, those with twelve lines or fewer. The last section is called "Uncollected Short Poems" because they were not in book form at the time of this printing.

POETRY / General 

ISBN: 978-1-962082-68-6 (print; softcover; perfect bound)

LCCN: 2025936448

Released April 29, 2025  |  Copyright 2025

342 pages

Author Biography

Nominated for the National Book Award, the Eric Hoffer Book Award, and nominated three times for the Pulitzer Prize, J.R. Solonche is the author of forty books of poetry and coauthor of another. He lives in the Hudson Valley.

Endorsements

“J. R. Solonche can pack so much humor and linguistic playfulness into such tight bundles, it feels like 1,000 clowns issuing from a VW Bug. He can also fit a lot of darkness and mortality into them, which feels more like 1,000 clowns dressed like Marilyn Mason issuing from a VW Bug. Solonche can be crass the way only the truthful can be, mischievous as a child with his hands in the honey jar, or even aphoristic and proverbial like a modern day Martial. Though you never know which Solonche you’re going to encounter on the next page, he’s a great bunch of guys to get to know.”
—Stephen Cramer, winner of the Louise Bogan Award and the National Poetry Series

“The poems of J. R. Solonche catch the reader off-guard in playful profundity. While always mindful of the tradition of poetry masquerading as direct statement (the like of W. C. Williams, Robert Bly, Robert Creeley, and Charles Bukowski), J. R. Solonche nevertheless ‘makes it new’ through his masterful use of understatement, aphorism, word play and anaphora—raising poem after thoughtful poem from the familiar and often overlooked ‘little things’ of the poet’s day-to-day encounter with the world.”
—Phillip Sterling, author of And Then Snow

“In a style that favors brevity and pith, J. R. Solonche brings a richness of experience, observation, and wit into his poems. Here is the world! they exclaim. And here and here and here! Watched over by ancient lyric gods—Time, Death, and Desire—we find the quotidian here transformed.”
—Christopher Nelson, editor of Green Linden Press

“Solonche, an accomplished poet, employs various forms in this compilation, including haiku, prose poem, and free verse. The poems often imaginatively enter into the natural or material world via anthropomorphic similes . . . Many works have an aphoristic quality that recall Zen koans, and they can be playfully amusing or even silly . . . A strong set of sympathetic but never sentimental observations.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“These short poems are an extraordinary amalgam of wit, close observation, humor, and clear-seeing. Each one singles out and illuminates an ordinary moment—ordinary, that is, until the poet explodes into a miniature epiphany. Easy of access and frequently profound, J. R. Solonche’s poems induce in me a state of delighted surprise.”
—Chase Twichell, author of Horses Where the Answers Should Have Been: New and Selected Poems

“The history of book blurbs is littered with high falutin’ praise, whacky and wild metaphors, written to impress not to inform. All I need to say about J. R. Solonche’s poems is that they are good, really, really good. So much so that they have a high “I-wish-I’d-written-that” factor. That’s a compliment I hand out to very few poets writing today. You want wit? You want humor? You want erudition? You want them all mixed into poems? Try Solonche. You won’t be disappointed. Envious perhaps, but not disappointed.”
­—John Murphy, editor of The Lake Contemporary Poetry Webzine

“Sample one by one these epigrammatic, epiphenomenal, Epicurean episodes as if they were puffs from a tower of pastry. Savor the zest of lemon, the pinch of sea salt, the dollop of crème fraiche, and the absence of any more sugar than necessary to ease the ingestion of truth. A feast for fanatics of language and lovers of pith. I’m not sure what pith is, but I know it when I see it.”
—Sarah White, author of Iridescent Guest

“The best feature of Solonche’s poetry is its diversity. Everyone who encounters this volume (including the postman who delivers it to you) will find something in it to understand and remember—and a great deal to enjoy.”
—Tony Beyer, author of Anchor Stone, finalist for the New Zealand Book Award

“Solonche is productive and prolific, but that doesn’t water down his poetry . . . He can compress a philosophical treatise into three lines . . . His epigrammatic tidy poems are philosophic gems. Solonche sees humor and encapsulates it; he frames a thought in perfect verse . . . He’s playful and profound—the more he writes, the more he seems to know. Beneath the Solonche simplicity are significant social comments, and his goodwill reinforces the best in us.”
—Grace Cavalieri, Washington Independent Review of Books

News and Reviews