MORE PRAISE FOR ICE

“Ice is alchemical, combining seemingly disparate elements to produce something new and unexpected. This is true of individual poems and of the collection as a whole, thanks to Keplinger’s curation: here are exhumed animals from the Pleistocene, here is a tank-sized facsimile of a beach, here is Emily Dickinson’s piano. Emergent properties arise from each of these pieces and from the book itself, representing more than the sum of the poems’ parts. What the reader brings to the experience is, of course, the final ingredient; but Keplinger’s skill provides both the spark and the space to facilitate transformation.”
—Rebecca Patrascu, Adroit Journal

“Keplinger’s Ice travels across time and space, both evoking the history of life on earth and focusing on personal losses, as in a portrait of a dying mother reading Dickinson– ‘My mother coughed again. / Little dashes in her sentences.’ There is an arresting intimacy to the icy breadth of this collection, a sense of something unvisited before.”
—Rebecca Morgan Frank, Literary Hub

Early Praise for Ice:

"Keep watch for David Keplinger. His poems, with their exquisite immediacy and valor, confront us with what we need to see: our intimate part in the fate of our planet. Yet even in the anguish, we experience the beauty of it, and feel a kind of redemption in the truth telling. You will want all your friends to read this book."
—Joanna Macy, World As Lover, World As Self

“David Keplinger’s Ice is Seamus Heaney’s North for the 21st century, which is to say that it knows history’s reverberating circle, how we learn about our contemporary selves from what, of itself, Earth chooses to exhume. From ice: a body. From ice: evidence, or parable, or prayer. In these tender, wondrous poems, Keplinger excavates Earth’s frozen archives of Anthropocene violence, preserved in the body, to remind us of the heft and joy of living.”
—Jenny Molberg, The Court of No Record

“Keplinger’s eighth book of poetry reveals once again how he keeps returning to beginner’s mind to refresh his vision and his voice. These poems are acts of love that come from and return to the silence that has seen it all and embraced all of it. There is no greater love than that. As I finished the book, I found myself deeply at home in this poet’s company. I believe that many others will find the same.”
—Parker J. Palmer, A Hidden Wholeness

“Few books move me as wholly and profoundly as David Keplinger’s do. Aching and revelatory, Ice, his latest poetry collection, speaks to that part of us that wants to preserve our tenderness for this world and those in it. As the first poem considers the prehistoric wolf unearthed by the thaw of climate change, it asks ‘how the head got severed from the heart.’ As we turn the pages, the question invites us to examine our own history, our purpose, our legacy. The hurt, the poems reveal, is where we might come together to love the world and each other.”
—Blas Falconer, Rara Avis