David Lee is a major figure in American letters: the author of fifteen books of poetry, a celebrated teacher, a legendary reader in classrooms, bookstores, and taverns; and the first poet laureate of Utah. His work is full of the most various qualities: soul-crushing tragedy, lyrical celebration, high comedy, storytelling ebullience. Rusty Barbed Wire: Selected Poems, now with us at last, brings to the community of readers raw power and radical beauty.
"Rusty Barbed Wire has a beautiful flow. Poetically rendered Americana; David Lee is a national treasure." - Mary Elizabeth Gillian, editor and publisher of Clover
"At last, a collection that gathers the best of David Lee's poems and allows us to read how, through his evolution as a poet, every poem has been an invitation to meet our humanity, to lean into the essential work of grief and love." - Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, Hush, Naked for Tea, and Even Now
"Lee carves a poetic path entirely his own, one unique in American poetry in how it joins true erudition with the deep forms of understanding laid down in the callouses and sinews of a hard-working body." - Katharine Coles, The Stranger I Become, Wayward, and The Earth Is Not Flat
"Rusty Barbed Wire: Selected Poems gathers some of David's best work from his many books . . . These poems belong together in a new way, for a new time, and for an old and new audience." - Cheryl Cox, publisher, Five Sisters Press
"Rusty Barbed Wire is a collection to be savored, and to be celebrated." - Robert Leonard Reid, Because It Is So Beautiful and Mountains of the Great Blue Dream
"It's quite enough to have mastered the West Texas slang and the renegade rough of what can never be found in those same badlands, but the scripture [Lee] regales with every wailing tongue is prescient, biting, and hysterical." - Shaun Griffin, Anthem for a Burnished Land and The Monastery of Stars
"Another reason you need to read this collection-its sanctuary of language is so resplendent that you'll be hard pressed not to feel saved." - Gailmarie Pahmeier, The House on Breakaheart Road and Of Bone, Of Ash, Of Ordinary Saints: A Nevada Gospel
"For those who are reading his poems for the first time, I can only smile at the thought of the joy awaiting them." - J.V. Brummels, All the Live-Long Day
"David Lee's poems have something in common with Whitman: they remind us that the world is a beautiful place, full of hope, delight, and awe, and that all who dwell here, no matter how small, are connected." - Lori Martin
"Utah's first Poet Laureate, master story-teller, consummate bard, David Lee gives us enough 'great lies // to shame the heavens.' All praise to this singer, to his ecstasy, to his compassion for what 'walks the earth heavy.'" - Paulann Petersen, Oregon Poet Laureate Emerita
