Christopher Locke has channeled the ghosts of Matt Bell, Denis Johnson, and Jac Jemc, while retaining his own unique voice.Winner of the Fall 2018 Black River Chapbook CompetitionThis house has seen things it won't let you forget.When a new family moves in to the house at 25 Trumbulls Road, the narrator's vivid dreams of a teary-eyed, raw-smelling woman who lives beneath the floor turn chillingly real. “ 25 Trumbulls Road is a haunting, surreal, visceral collection of tales that is lyrical and poetic, while not losing its bite. Tony Cohan, author of On Mexican Time and Native State “In Ordinary Gods, it is Christopher Locke’s alert poet’s ear and listening heart that propel the reader, mining surprise.” David Allan Cates, author of Hunger in America and Tom Connor’s Gift This is an open-hearted book by a generous and talented writer.” Ordinary Gods is a collection of poems and stories that take us down Locke’s own heroic path toward feeling it all-and because he’s so good, we get to feel it all, too.
“Christopher Locke gives us his hopes, his fears, and most importantly, what he loves. Whether set “There” in Mexico or “Here” in a rented house in coastal Maine, these poems navigate between an inner emotional realm, fraught with the speaker’s fear of dissolution and loss, and the outer physical world, at once dangerous and comfortingly familiar, where life is nourished-or unexpectedly challenged-by the numinous beauty that “rises / from the common, caught fluttering / in the breath of every day.”” In Locke’s trespassed landscapes, heat is made palpable as a “heavy broth of light,” birds “buckshot” the air, and Aztec gods bear names “like hornets.” Poem by poem, Locke’s language anoints the ordinary and raises it toward transcendence. “Reading Christopher Locke‘s exquisite Trespassers, one can’t help but marvel at his masterful command of metaphor and sensory images-startling, often brutal and unsettling, but always apt. Underneath their dark surfaces lie a genuine empathy and humanness.” They face the world, unflinching, laughing when they can, full of weird affection. Like Arthur Miller, Locke gives us work that is desperate and difficult to watch unfold-but in it we also find the hope and grit of the beleaguered.
An angry Nun stands over his speaker in the third grade “…her skirt as black/as a tornado before it inhales a barn.” Or, (in the same poem!) a teenage ballplayer’s body “is loose as rainwater.” Visceral, lucid, original.” Billy Collins “Christopher Locke is a poet with huge imaginative and metaphorical gifts, i.e., his imagination is poetic. Read a few opening lines and you’ll find yourself helplessly engaged.” “Christopher Locke writes true-story poems about growing up in America, poems delivered in plain, sure-footed language.
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