“Among cornfields, junkyards, and a Dairy Queen, the eclectic cast
of Rustin Larson’s Lost Letters and Windfalls marches across a rural
stage: an old woman small ‘like a burlap bag/ full of nylons,’ family
members, angels, finches, the wind, the muse, and a young girl in a
Degas painting. The poet asserts: ‘The light falls upon all things. I
have/ my memory of you—quiet as a/ picture frame among all these
broken houses.’ In poem after poem, Larson captures images firmly
cast in time yet eternal—even slightly holy: ‘But here’s what we are:
each man, each woman,/ each neuter object, a church.’”
“‘Listen,’ Larson urges, ‘the world/ begins in a moment.’ The
moments described in these poems are painterly and vivid. The poet
trusts only his ‘sense of touch.’ They conjure a world of isolated
stillness where
