"Earthly Freight is a beautiful and brave collection of poetry, abounding with rich life experience carefully considered. In the tradition of Yeats and Frost, Lindsay Knowlton uses images from the natural world of manatees and waxwings and oxen and owls to reveal profound truths about human events and relationships, from the untimely death of a beloved brother to a difficult father to loves failed and blessed. With Earthly Freight, Knowlton shows us how, by paying close attention, we can enrich and validate our own lives and loves. This is a marvelous book." -Howard Frank Mosher, novelist Disappearances, Where the River Flows North "There's certainly something to be said for the notion that poetry is-or can be-a kind of mathematics, with subject elements factored in rather than out. What you get is not computable, but not arguable either. Take these lines from Knowlton's "Central Park", touching on the simultaneous advents of spring and a brother's fatal cancer: "...I saw that facts/were chaff,/that in perishing's lone distillery/exactitude drifts/like a petal..." They may not prove anything, but they are balancing life and death. That's a pretty powerful equation. And there are fifty-three more Knowlton poems in this truly impressive collection." -Peter Kane Dufault, poet Looking in All Directions, Selected Poems 1954-2000, To Be in the Same World, 2007, 1996 Norton Anthology