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Fix Quiet
Poems
Poch, John
Winner of The New Criterion Poetry Prize
John Poch’s fourth collection of poems, Fix Quiet, is an ambitious exploration in verse of failure, death, and a redemptive beauty found in the surprise of order. From the opening poem, “Shrike,” which is itself a meditation on poetry as paradoxically both predator and prey, to the final love poem, a crown of sonnets, these poems unite the form and function of line, rhyme, syntax, rhetorical wit, and larger architectures, to capture moments in time and name them. Poems that move from the rivers of northern New Mexico to travel across Italy are concerned with how the limitations of time and place wound and disappoint but also how they expand our vision and take us deeper into experience. A river can’t be apprehended easily, but here by faith the poet takes the measure of the headwaters to the sea, of our greatest moving mysteries of love and death.
John Poch was born in Erie, Pennsylvania, in 1966. He took an M.F.A. in Poetry from the University of Florida and a Ph.D. in English from the University of North Texas. He has taught in the creative writing program at Texas Tech University for fourteen years and has published poems in Agni, Image, Poetry, Ploughshares, Yale Review, and many other journals. In Spring 2014 he was a Fulbright Core Scholar at the University of Barcelona in Spain.