Gratitude,
Poems by John Repp 
John Repp’s Gratitude continues the poignant, historically-inflected meditation of his previous work, while adding an abiding humor and a grounding sense of joy. His poetry—and this book—is a true act of gratitude, and inspires the same in us.
"Desire is relentless in the company of ego and intellect, sorrows and loves in John Repp’s Gratitude. Ready or not, desire releases our difficult and luscious perceptions, so that, with wild eyes, we are able to see many worlds colliding simultaneously. Stark visual effects, often revealed with great tenderness, invite us to look more closely at our labors, losses, and renewals that arrive hard-won. Come near, these poems sing, and see the skin of the elephant of Margate: ‘a mossy glade/or close enough’ and grow the basil, drink the wine, bless the child and the lover, work and read the wild life long.”—Judith Vollmer, author of Reactor
"I’ve just finished John Repp’s splendid new volume with, yes, gratitude. These are poems that find a passionate inward music, sometimes quiet, as in the beautiful ‘Claiming Territory,’ sometimes incantatory, as in ‘I Want to Buy This House.’ Everywhere in these pages the reader will discover a firm mastery of the art of poetry, with links to the past, with forays into the present and future of the genre. The language throughout is tough, concrete, and personal: a long-meditated diction, expertly culled, gathered into verse, lifted into song.”—Jay Parini, author of The Art of Subtraction: New and Selected Poems
From Reviews of The Fertile Crescent
"[T]he man knows the duty consciousness thrusts upon him, and so he shoulders it from the time when his grandmother was a girlish immigrant through his own youth of dismal day jobs and dope to these bleak days listening to war news as he puts his son to bed...Repp never takes his eyes off the small pleasures and hard blows of the everyday world.”—Patrick Daily, Chicago Reader
"As admirable as Repp’s ambitions for his poems are, and as worthy of recognition, they do not make the poems somber or unapproachable. Repp is willing to throw in references that take him all across our cultural maps...[a]nd his pleasure in the play of words often allows him to set up a certain atmosphere for the reader before....changing what might have seemed to be an ordinary description into something more ominous. It is at that necessary but uncomfortable place where John Repp finds himself as a poet and where he adds his distinctive voice to the literary landscape.”—Keith Taylor, American Book Review
"John Repp’s The Fertile Crescent is an unsettling book...about things that should make us sit up straight, widen our eyes, make us more aware.”—Jennifer MacPherson, Comstock Review
A widely published poet, fiction writer, and essayist, John Repp is the author of Thirst Like This (University of Missouri Press, 1990), which won the Devins Award in Poetry, and The Fertile Crescent, winner of the 2003 Lyre Prize from Cherry Grove Collections, as well as four limited-edition chapbooks. Recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship and Residency Fellowships from Yaddo, the Hawthornden Castle International Retreat for Writers, and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, he teaches writing and literature at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania, works in the Arts-in-Education Program of the Pennsylvania Council for the Arts, and lives in Erie with his wife, Katherine Knupp, and their son, Dylan.
ISBN 1932339140, 88 pages, $17.00