“Here, then gone. We sense each / other in the dark, hands outstretched beneath / humming wires, holding on,” Jeff Ewing writes toward the end of Wind Apples, an astonishingly aching collection of poems that resonate and vibrate, so struck with awe are they. His poems bear witness to the ephemeral—not always as elegy, but as a way to wonder and to make monument out of fleeting moments of beauty in the natural world, or fleeting connections between people—be they lovers or family members. And though those hands reach out, Ewing also reminds us that “the gods let us know when we’ve overreached.” In poem after burnished poem, he lights the darkness for us, allows us to see clearly a world that is here, then gone. He inspires us to keep looking, and not to turn away.
—James Allen Hall