Unbecoming

""What is the minimum required?" Reading Neil Surkan, minimum maximizes the elegant, sparing truth in a poetics where each line is drawn to incise, open, lay things bare. "He wonders" the driving force of Surkan's sophomore effort, "Poetry is such a wounded smell. At best, we feel exhilarated by our rootedness," deepened as questions, good questions, 'stream in floods of words that, / like fish scales on furniture, / cling for awhile and shine / the dull way dried tears shine." Here, the promise of Surkan's debut bursts forth. Wonder becomes wondrous, "The still symmetry continues," and baby the infinities shine bright. "Why are you so invested in keeping us alive?" This collection insists we're still breathing, there's a beat. Unbecoming is nothing less than brilliant." Kirby, author of This Is Where I Get Off and Poetry Is Queer

"The poems collected in this outstanding volume are alive with quirky but resonant phrases ('Gnomes // lazing on pea gravel / beside a breeze-blocked truck'), with haunting character sketches and glimpses into both the mysteries of nature and the whirligig motions of a restless imagination. Surkan slides effortlessly from quotidian scenes into intimations of the sublime, from probes into his personal and family history to witty conjugations of weather and landscape. Elegant, unpredictable, inventive, these poems linger long in the memory." Mark Ford, author of Enter, Fleeing

"A celery-green river unlocking, fossils chiselled out of rock ledges, third-generation firs – the natural world shifts, is altered, revises itself. In Unbecoming, love is change. Neil Surkan refutes gender scripts, makes visible the tenderness between men. 'I've a new, / unfurling sense,' he writes. Clear-eyed, rich with dazzling imagery, his poems blaze with the elemental: water, sky, land, and love." Eduardo C. Corral, author of Guillotine: Poems

"Unbecoming is calm, but never still – every detail buzzes. Inquisitive and playful, these poems wander between generations, between 'days without injury,' between what we hold on to and what we throw away. And yet, 'all we vanished / persists where blue dozed / on old maps: a nurdled / vortex, a snaggled / garbage patch, expands.' To visit the places and meet the people of Surkan's poetry is to be reminded 'how much it means / we get to change,' and perhaps how much we need to change." T. Liem, author of Obits