ReviewTo reconstitute a notion of the Buddha’s, days spent on the water do not count against one’s allotted days. Falling from the clear headwaters, the poems in this revivifying collection approach time’s passage in such a radical manner. While the deft prosody enacts a sense of the illusory, the vivid images of the natural world are crafted with a pine-knot density and durability. Fluvial and urgent and pleasing, this is one of the rare collections capable of enriching days spent astream.—Chris Dombrowski, author of Body of WaterLike Lorine Niedecker, Andrew C. Gottlieb gives us the fluid, ever-changing heart of human identity—political, personal, and environmental. In the restless, cascading lines of Flow Variations, water is what we love, what we grasp after, what we fight for. Gottlieb’s lush layering of sound captures this gorgeous necessity in all its protean beauty: “rippled/ dimples sipping/ surface bugs under.” But in these keenly observed poems, we also come face to face with water’s merciless materiality—“a river never forgives,” he says, “never compromises/its vision.” In our moment, one in which “we already know each day brings/ its glittering assault,” Gottlieb’s precision-tuned language helps us acknowledge both the flows of our own perceptions and the fact that water is “already past/ you /long gone.”—Karen Leona Anderson, author of Punish Honey and ReceiptAbout the AuthorBorn in Ontario, Canada, Andrew C. Gottlieb grew up outside of Boston, Massachusetts, and since 1998, he's lived on the West Coast of the United States, dividing his time between Southern California and the Pacific Northwest. He taught composition and short story writing at Iowa State University and at the University of Washington, where he received his MA and MFA in English and Creative Writing, respectively. He's been awarded grants from the Seattle Arts Commission and the Seattle-based Artist Trust Foundation, and has been writer-in-residence at six different-often wilderness-locations including Denali National Park, Everglades National Park, the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest, Isle Royale National Park, and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts. His writing has appeared in many anthologies and journals including American Fiction, Best New Poets, Denver Quarterly, Ecotone, The Fly Fish Journal, Mississippi Review, Orion, Poetry Northwest, Poets & Writers, and Tampa Review, and he's currently on the editorial board for Terrain.org: A Journal of the Built + Natural Environments. When he's not reading, writing, or with his family, he can often be found on a river.