books

Fetch, Muse

Able Muse Press, November 2021

Fetch, Muse is Rebecca Starks’s second full-length collection, with precisely crafted, moving poems that are by turns heartwarming and heartrending. Starks presents a powerful account of the integration of a dog with behavioral issues into a family. Along the way, with “memory burning [her] into brilliance,” understanding deepens of the dog Kismet as an individual, of human beings’ wilder inclinations, and of the nature of warmth given and received. This is a unique collection of longing and introspection, uncovering a closer sense of the life around us, our inner nature, our humanity.

Praise for Fetch, Muse

This book shows that the range of feelings that goes into taking in and then giving up a dog is as deep and wide an emotional swath as any we experience as people, which is to say non-dogs. The insights, confusions, misgivings, wary moments, and entangled joys are all here along with a steady self-scrutiny. We forget, we let go, but we don’t forget the deep tie between dogs and humans and how crucial yet fraught that tie is. Fetch, Muse offers poetry of a very high order to apprehend matters that are basic to our flawed, yearning humanity.

—Baron Wormser, Maine Poet Laureate Emeritus, author of Tom o’ Vietnam

What brims from this elegant collection? A sorrow both compassionate and contemplative, a sorrow wise and deep. Rebecca Starks gives us poems spoken in direct address to her rescued dog named Kismet. “Fetch, Muse,” she says, commanding the dog to “…do the work / of memory, dropping life at my feet.” And Kismet obeys. In mostly subverted, non-traditional sonnets, Starks’s poems retrieve from memory the story of a rescue that is fated to ultimately fail. Rich with allusion, her work–with its wit and insight and music–salvages for us the story of her relationship with a creature whose very name means fate. 

— Paulann Petersen, Oregon Poet Laureate Emerita, author of Understory

Fetch, Muse is a book of real poems with a real subject, a subject which is difficult to tackle successfully, and Rebecca Starks achieves that success. The poems, mostly unrhymed sonnets, muse on her wayward dog and on her family life. The dog is her true muse. There are many great lines I could quote, but here is the beginning line of a typical sonnet: “Fetch, muse, bring me back what I rejected,” ending with the memorable final line, “your fetch as long as your leash pulls you up.” Powerful. 

— Greg Delanty, Guggenheim Fellow, author of No More Time

Time Is Always Now

Able Muse Press, November 2019

Buy from Amazon here, from Bookshop here, through Indiebound here, or from Able Muse Press here. 

Rebecca Starks’s Time Is Always Now unfolds against a backdrop of nature, often permeated in unexpected ways with the human dynamics of family, neighborhood, and nation. Her poems convey the urgency within moments of transformation–whether seasonal, as in wilderness and garden; physical, as in the trajectory of youth, aging, and death; or political, as in the challenges of misgovernance and the environmental exigencies of our time. This finalist in the Able Muse Book Award is a finely wrought, thought-provoking collection.

Praise for Time is Always Now

“Drawing from sources as wide-ranging as Emily Dickinson, Apocalypse Now, fairy tales, and social media, Rebecca Starks’s Time Is Always Now deftly balances intelligence and pathos, resisting easy dichotomies and judgments. As these fine poems insist, the present is relentless, and we are immersed: ‘No, not out of time; helplessly in it.’ Ours is a country of guns; ours is a ‘middle-aged earth’ in decline—and yet, we are here, witnessing, questioning. I am grateful for Starks’s voice in the present moment, and I’m grateful to have her poems to carry with me into the future, whatever it may bring.”

—Maggie Smith, author of Good Bones

Rebecca Starks writes with a sense that time can be stopped in a poem, lives suspended and drawn inward, even in the most aimless moments. There’s a wonderful clarity to Time Is Always Now, an electricity that feels bright and wild. It’s to be found in the roadsides and a robin’s “clutch,” in the retina that “registers pain,” in the sky at dusk and the “months of mud.” I greet these poems with so much enthusiasm—these poems that crave, clarify, and propose sublime ways to become refreshed in our most confused times. 

—David Biespiel (from the foreword), author of Republic Café

“At one point, Rebecca Starks describes a winter hike, in which she crosses “sociable mouse hops, two feet together” and passes “a squirrel’s scramble at the base of a tree,/ then the bunched landings of a mustelid bound/ from the yawn under one log to another.” Several of her wonderful book’s qualities are evidenced here. If too many poets, in their ignorance, regard nature as a mere repository of metaphor, Starks, like Frost, is both knowledgeable and uncannily accurate about it. (“Yawn” is the perfect word, say, in this passage.) Her sinuous and heavily subordinated syntax is also suggestive of a mind with great range, geographical, thematic, and prosodic, though she can also, as, for instance, in “American Flag,” move by a cunning terseness.” 

—Sydney Lea, author of The Music of What Happens: Lyric and Everyday Life

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