-Jason Sommer, author of Portulans

Robert Lowes's Shocking the Dark begins with mystics and fly balls: "those sprints / to the right place / in the first place." Later, he holds up another "catch," praising "the jewel-like greens and blues/of shingled scales . . . conquests, not gifts." Throughout, we witness possession and persecution, poems that shock even the dark. Lowes analyzes chaos through varied form-pantoums, sonnets, free verse, ghazals, couplets, haiku, a series on Paul Klee, whose late paintings "prophesied . . . the Holocaust." But do not despair: there's enough hope, faith, and humor to light the way.

-Marjorie Maddox, author of Begin with a Question

This book might have been titled after one of its poems, "Divine Regret," for registering the world's sublime beauty, mixed as it is with the seemingly unnecessary pain and error built into it. These poems, beating with a liturgical rhythm of thought, illuminate, delay, perhaps even push back the dark, be it nightfall, injustice, or death. Lowes is aware of gaps. Gaps between doubter and tradition, between art and its context, between reader and writer, created and creator. And so this collection crackles with irony-but also with acts of creation, acknowledgment, acceptance, and gratitude.

-Chuck Sweetman, author of Enterprise, Inc.