Toughs
 

“Ed Falco’s poetry debut Wolf Moon Blood Moon is achingly beautiful.  Primarily about loss, these poems embrace not only those we lose to death, but the parts of ourselves we lose with time—the loss of a child when that child becomes grown; the loss of lovers; the loss of memory; even the loss of memory imagined. Falco has a profound understanding of violence, and particularly poignant are the poems about mass shootings, domestic brutality, war, and natural disasters.  Fiction writer extraordinaire, Falco is a first-rate storyteller in this exquisite, intelligent, cadence-filled verse.  By embracing melancholy, Falco paradoxically shines light, affirming the human spirit. Wolf Moon Blood Moon reads as an ode to our very lives.”

— Denise Duhamel

 
 

 

 

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Ed Falco’s brilliant debut poetry collection, Wolf Moon Blood Moon, like his novels and short stories before, is filled with beauty and hope and loss. In finely crafted works—in traditional forms, free verse, and amazing poems in prose—this award-winning author goes straight to the human condition: to our shared humanity and, sadly, to our shared inhumanity. Falco’s Wolf Moon Blood Moon presents incomparable beauty, but also incomprehensible suffering. In Ancient Egyptian funerary rites, the ethmoid bone was pierced and the brain scooped out through a nostril and discarded. The deceased’s heart, deemed the source of intellect and feeling, remained in place. Falco’s brilliant collection reminds us of the heart’s importance.

— Stephen Gibson

What great trust we develop in Ed Falco’s observations; what great pleasure we take in his nuanced and melodious contemplations.  Deeply grounded in the natural world, Wolf Moon Blood Moon reckons with history and memory, with violence and grace.  With a poet’s ear and a novelist’s instinct for the stories that matter, Falco had provided us a necessary tonic and a deeply satisfying book.

--Beth Ann Fennelly