Salt Moon by Noel CrookSalt Moon

Winner of the 2015 Julie Suk Award (Learn more)

Finalist, Texas Institute of Letters 2016 Bob Bush Award for First Book of Poetry

Finalist, Foreward Review's 2015 INDIEFAB contest
(Learn more)

Southern Illinois University Press, 80 pages, 6 x 9 inches, ISBN-13: 978-0809333875, ISBN-10: 0809333872

"Crook merges worlds—white sun, white moon—in poems whose yearning leads us back and forth from stars to nearer fires." — Dorianne Laux, author of The Book of Men

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Publisher's Description: Throughout Salt Moon, Noel Crook forges the kind of tragic vision Howard Nemerov described as the mark of our finest poets: Drawing on myth and memory, Crook’s fierce lyrics reveal a world that is at once “hopeless and beautiful…giving equal emphasis to both words.” Sacrifice and betrayal, parental love and patricide, unleashed desire and cornered despair—these antitheses fuel Crook’s Ovidian imagination, which ranges freely from Comanche raids in Texas to a slave plantation in North Carolina, from a carpet maker in Istanbul to the beggars in Delhi, from her daughter’s hospital room to the war in Iraq. Rendered in instantly unforgettable images, Salt Moon is that rare book which grows richer with each reading. Read more information from Southern Illinois Press.


Poems

Notes from a Salt Flat Prisoner
Published in Smartish Pace and Best New Poets 2014 {PDF}

The Sunday Swim, Comanche Trace
Read by Garrison Keillor for The Writers Almanac

Dog Heart
Published in Verse Daily

Crows
Published in Southeast Review {PDF}

The Twins
Published in Tar River Poetry {PDF}

Smith Canyon
Published in The Atlanta Review {PDF}