New poetry collection to be released from Cornerstone Press (University of Wisconsin Stevens Point) on September 15, 2026. Now available for pre-order via the press and Amazon.
The reviews:
These are poems of mortality, of loss, of generational nuance and dissonance and wisdom in the landscape of contemporary American violences. The world’s details are filtered through the senses: “sand like birdshot / raking your eyelids,” “the gravel / pinging unsteady / as tin roof rain.” They reflect the aesthetics of labor, of getting by. The forms of these poems feature short lines, a hushed compression, just right for the haunted resonance of their subjects, the landscapes infused with ghosts.
–Diane Seuss, author of the poetry collections Frank: Sonnets (2021), winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
If the boys follow the starkly presented advice in Garrett Stack’s riveting new collection, Advice for the Boys, those boys are gonna be ready to live in a scarred earth world. One hardscrabble experience or another is all that lies ahead. Ambiguity is extinct. Beauty is an operatic evocation of an avocado. “Yeah,” shrugs the advice giver, “This is the way it is”. Unlike many American poems that exit leaving you with an open ending on which to reflect, Stack’s hard rock aesthetic slams your heart with a hard left leaving you pushing yourself back up and wondering whether to face another blow. And what would the hardened-nosed advice giver stare at you and mutter? “You better get up. Yeah, you better.”
–Jack Ridl, author of Practicing to Walk Like a Heron, named by Foreword Review, “The Nation’s Best Collection of Poetry for 2013.”
While advice is frequently offered with confidence, by people of noteworthy experience or knowledge—even wisdom—it is often a confidence tempered by some uncertainty as well: whether or not the advice is appropriate, helpful, or will be heeded. Such uncertainty is better known as compassion, and the poems in this collection are luminous examples. Advice for the Boys is rife with wisdom and empathy. Variously framed—narrative, sonnet, cheribun, lyric—the poems are thematically unified, as odes to a domestic life of joys and sorrows and the places they inhabit: the kitchens and bedrooms, car shows and barber shops, taverns, gymnasiums, and hospitals of hometown America, much in the tradition of James Wright or Philip Levine. And while the poet will admit that “judging a man’s no easy job,” it is through Stack’s exploration of “the present / as extraordinary time,” that readers may come to accept—wisely and compassionately—that perhaps “this is, in fact, the life you hoped for.”
–Phillip Sterling, author of Lessons in Geography