Marlon Fick's The Tenderness and the Wood is a rarity in contemporary poetry. Here, we are presented with high lyricism, lush imagery, and striking metaphors. But also, the realization that beauty remains inextricable from grief, loss, and violence. It is Fick's astute understanding of the complexities of aesthetic experience that sets his work apart. This is a truly remarkable book.

Marlon L. Fick has drilled down to earthy quick--dredging up something old and something new, giving contemporary poetry a one-of-a-kind voice through persistent passion. Thus, this poet's active meditation among worldly, searching intrigues in The Tenderness and the Wood is indeed illuming, where the human heart is a sacred and profane tuning fork. Fick knows how to go inside the hard questions of existence and deliver us to personal truth. His rhetorical leaps are risky but surefooted: "And/ a sparrow in a leafless redbud is occupied by a mute terror." Like a seasoned musician, Marlon L. Fick's images sing through raw, audacious, naked, mysterious feeling.

In this book, you will be arrested at the boundary of what's impossible to say, so you have to say it surreal. Marlon Fick can't make sense of things that don't make sense, so he makes a kind of poetic fire instead--he makes "an eclipse of sun-eating cats." He makes "wings that hurt." He makes "the light that only the dying see." And in these poems, he will help you see what can't be seen, and understand what must be known.