Pen and Anvil Press

From the collection:

(my heart’s a hare)

(sundays now)

(in sleep i draw the dark )

Be A Lamb // poems by James Stotts // 978-0982162576

November 2023
price: $16.95
paper binding
poetry

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These short, sad poems seem written from the bent posture of a man who we can picture doubled over in prayer, or else sitting hunch-shouldered at the bar sharing a whiskey with Apollo. The dim light in the bar is dead-leaf yellow. The music playing on the box in the corner is all country western and mise en abyme.

The three sections of this new collection from James Stotts are bound together by lyric compression as tight in its precision as bailing wire. The downbeat poet is lamb-voiced and lion-weary. He field-strips memories and idly reconfigures their torn parts into sonnets as spindly-lean as spiders’ legs.

When Stotts notices of himself, “my doubt has faded / but my song has faded too / and faster,” he shows himself to be a keen amateur scholar of the sore heart. When he worries—never disingenuously, never ironically—that he might mistake his “mediocre genius / for pattern recognition”, he’s getting closer than ever to the heart of the matter.

These are the melancholy arias we hum in the lonely hours of a long night.

Acclaim for the poetry of James Stotts:

Aaron Fagan, author of Pretty Soon: "The poetry of James Stotts invites us into its spaces and sensibilities. What is tame becomes wild in that place where the conscious and unconscious meet. These lyrics are models of anchoritic meditation—spare but without omissions. Be a Lamb serves the danger and depth of the familiar, and we pulse in the face of it."

Angel Dionne, author of Inanimate Objects: "Stotts' poetry is rich, nuanced, and poignant—a pleasurable and at times tangible experience. His newest collection does more than engage readers; it seduces them."

Ann Kjellberg, editor, Little Star: "In the poems of James Stotts, a lonely man — hung-over, or a little drunk — navigates his way among the world’s last things. He is saved not by answers but by song: the rhymes come closer, the rhythm approaches the heartbeat, and at the end the language itself seems to offer some simple orientation, a firm bed on which to plant a foot."

Melissa Green, author of Magpiety: "Finding Stotts’ poetry, I felt the way one does when you see an athlete, say a figure skater, perform a perfect routine, where the music, the poise, the genius of the body all work sublimely together, and when it’s over, you clap with a concussed kind of joy because you know you have seen something extraordinary."

George Kalogeris , winner of the James Dickey Prize for Poetry: "Elgin Pelicans is an achievement of modern lyric."

Carol Moldaw, on Elgin Pelicans: "It riveted me from the get-go: it engages on a syllabic level and builds and thrills and surprises."

Irene Koronas, Poetry Editor, Wilderness House Literary Review: "This is lyric poetry that teases; converses; connects us to the characters and ideas god may have for us, or to god as lost meaning."

About the author:

James Stotts was born in 1982, the last of five children, in southern Colorado, and grew up in New Mexico. He studied Russian literature and linguistics at the University of New Mexico, was a research assistant in Russian at Boston College, and has translated the Russian poetry of Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva, Esenin, Brodsky, Boris Ryzhy and others. He has traveled and studied in Russia on numerous occasions. He lives in New Mexico.

Click here to watch the author's 2019 appearance at the Wellfleet Library Poetry Series, and click here to read the author's conversations with Thomas Whyte, editor of the Poetry Mini Interviews website.