Description

Black Lawrence Press, paperback

Publication Date:April 23, 2021

“Do you dare dive into the pool of someone’s time on earth, bright moments and dark humors treated with equal care? Are you ready for poems that cannily align ‘shrimp, sandwiches, beer by the pitcher, the meaning of life’ with a confident hand? The maximalist panache of MATING CALLS OF THE DEAD takes on forbidden subjects and pulls no punches. Steve Kistulentz’s lineation, formal acuity, and soundplay give even the heaviest experiences a light touch on the page. ‘And I am waiting for the love parade, / for the 11 o’clock news to tell me who’s won, / who’s lost:’ aren’t we all? We have all been waiting for this terrific collection.”Sandra Beasley

“‘I keep reminding myself // history is a list of lovers or fractures, / and most of mine are now healed,’ Steve Kistulentz tells us in ‘It Is All Falling Indelibly Into the Past,’ the opening poem of MATING CALLS OF THE DEAD. This collection beckons us to visit those ghost figures and ruptures, pulling out a bar stool and unraveling memory in masterful, heartbreaking detail. Kistulentz journeys to a family’s past, whether a ‘moment / captured in Ektachrome’ or conversation overheard and still recalled, and into a present where mortality looms and desire surfaces like a verse of a long-forgotten hymn. MATING CALL OF THE DEAD charms, rivets, and devastates. Take this book to bed with you.”Mary Biddinger

“At their strongest, the poems in MATING CALLS OF THE DEAD are among the best recent poems of the American South. Steve Kistulentz’s voice is always clear, direct, and forceful, and though Kistulentz plunges into the depths, he never loses his sense of where he is, nor, most importantly, his sense of where his reader is. MATING CALLS OF THE DEAD is a remarkable collection.”Shane McCrae

“There are 171,476 words in the English language, and at least 170,000 ways to avoid the truth. But luckily the poet Steve Kistulentz and MATING CALLS OF THE DEAD have appeared at last, connecting us, and the dots. These dandy, searing, searching poems provide the news we need, how death doesn’t care but we do, and how ‘no iron can stab / the heart like a poem written for a near-stranger.'”Alan Michael Parker