photo credit Bill Cottman 

In Waiting For A Spaceship  J. Otis Powell‽ pens a deep acknowledgement to both the pain of language and its potential for liberation. In these elegant and absorbing poems, J. Otis‽ plays soloist to a backdrop of jazz rhythm, capable of moving from the elegiac to the celebratory in one shift of tone, expressing the haunted nature of American life: “Ghosts hitch rides on bodies/move inside souls.” The lyrical improvisation of his lines moves us simultaneously closer to moments of insight, haunting, and deliverance. “Ivory bones at the bottom of the Atlantic/Ghosts dance to water music nobody composed.” To read Waiting For A Spaceship is to find deep recognition with openness and ferocity. His poems describe how the moment of poetic expression arrives in daily life at soul level. This is a poetry of necessity.

John Colburn SPOUT Press

Links:
http://www.spdbooks.org/Products/9780983547846/waiting-for-a-spaceship.aspx

https://www.amazon.com/Waiting-Spaceship-J-Otis-Powell/dp/098354784X/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1497903018&sr=8-2&keywords=j.+otis+powell