Danger Face
By C.W. Emerson
$18.00 Poetry - Paperback
Danger Face
Danger Face, the recipient of the 2024 Homebound Publications Poetry Prize, is a profound exploration of family and legacy through the lens of C.W. Emerson’s evocative poetry.
This collection delves into the intricate web of familial ties—examining the cards we're dealt, the curses and inheritances from generations past, and the impact of these legacies on our lives. Emerson's poetry illuminates these themes with striking clarity, revealing the weight of ancestral ghosts, weaknesses, and addictions.
Emerson skillfully employs persona and first-person narratives to blend the spectral with the magical, intertwining the extraordinary with the everyday. He begins by tracing the matrilineal line, where figures such as divas, mothers, and great-grandmothers emerge, vanish, and reappear. The collection then shifts to the poet's own journey, from childhood experiences at race tracks and country auctions to grappling with heart disease and mortality in adulthood. As Danger Face unfolds, the setting moves to Mexico, reflecting on themes of artistic ambition and the formation of new familial bonds later in life.
Fearlessly confronting both the unsettling and the tender, Emerson invites us to reveal our true selves with his call to “show me your true self, your danger face.” At the same time, he tenderly portrays the depth of lived experience, as seen in his depiction of the diva’s voice—“each note containing all the pathos of a full life, richly lived, an existence / that was nothing she could have planned.”
In its unique voice, Danger Face captures the vibrant energy of youth and the unpredictable nature of adulthood, engaging with profound themes of family, home, transience, and the will to persist.
"This remarkable debut collection by C.W. Emerson showcases the poet’s mastery of rhapsodic elegy and his vitality to bear witness beyond suffering in order to celebrate the everyday miracle of being alive. Nightly, the dead arrive in dreams, their presence accusatory arias, perhaps “because there’s a severance to be paid.” Poems of lost generations carry gorgeous indelible images, “deep percussive tones” of “autumn’s umber, / gilded with falling snow.” The title poem urges, despite knowing those who love will leave, to show “your true face, your danger face,” thus risking that those “who love goodness and light prevail.” Even as the longings of a youth raised on horse racing and pink betting slips and a father who rejected him carry on into later life, even after the traumatic dissolution of a marriage, even after surviving serious cardiac surgery, the poet revels in the “numinous light” we all share. Emerson sings in the necessary voices of compassion, grief, and redemption to deliver the reader an experience of being gloriously ensconced in the spirituality, mysticism, and fulfilling, heartbreaking, exquisite comedic tragedy that is life."
Lana Hechtman Ayers, author of The Autobiography of Rain
"Danger Face, the stunning title poem of C.W. Emerson’s new collection, a poem in the form of a duplex, comprises a dare – to the self, to the other: “Show me your true self, your danger face.” But is there a “true” self, or is there only one? The poems in the collection seem to complicate the very notion of self — how anyone comes to be who they are, and who they might become — navigating the uncertain landscape of the speaker’s history and pre-history, and opening a path into the unknowable future, toward whatever lies beyond the self, the individual life.
I listen for the flute of my own existence,
but hear only the wind
in
the high-above palms.
Emerson’s poems invite the reader into a liminal space, unsettled and unsettling, by turns shadowy and luminous. They also explore the risk to the self of love — the risk of pain and transformation, wounds in the psyche opened and reopened and never quite healed — and remind us of how dangerous it is to be mortal, to be human, and how mysterious, and how wonderful."
Cecilia Woloch — author of Tsigan: The Gypsy Poem
Off Coldwater Canyon
By C.W. Emerson
$12.00 Poetry - Paperback
Off Coldwater Canyon
Third Place Winner of The Poetry Book Chapbook Prize, 2020
Off Coldwater Canyon explores the emergence of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Los Angeles. The poems contained in this small volume hold a haunting, unmistakable relevance for those living through today's near-universal experience of global pandemic. Echoing an era described by the poet as "the impossible time," they hold out the possibility of survival in the midst of great sorrow and loss, and the attribution of meaning and purpose to the life that remains.
"Emerson's poetry is so honest, its narrative so clear, that his compassion runs through every line: in the care he gave to his dying friends, the comfort he later tried to offer as a caregiver for strangers, and the blunt descriptions of the hollow aftermath and long road to recovery. This is a big-hearted poet, and a book that remembers and doesn't look away."
Amy Miller — Contest Judge 2020
"In this breathtakingly beautiful, heartbreakingly personal elegy to friends and lovers lost in the early days of the AIDS epidemic, C.W. Emerson maps a journey from innocence hungry for experience to experience hungry for lost innocence."
Cecilia Woloch — author of Tsigan: The Gypsy Poem
"Emerson dignifies the paths of those who have crisscrossed his own with a limpid accuracy that pinpoints and transpierces the essence of our fleeting existence and names it, a quality that destines this collection to become a classic in league with Thom Gunn's The Man with Night Sweats."
Lise Goettt — author of Leprosarium
Tuesday, November 12th, 2024
6:30 - 8:30 pm (Pacific TIme)
On Zoom - Doors Open at 6:00
Head For the Hills
Lana H. Ayers & C.W. Emerson & Open Mic, 1 Poem, 1 Page
Dale Champlin is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting. Look for a link in an upcoming email or send your request to dale@champlindesign.com
The Older American Poet Is On YouTube
Visit My Channel For Videos About Poetry and Other Things
I'd Like To Hear From You!
Get in touch and let's connect! Whether you're a fellow poet, a journalist looking for an interview, or just someone passionate about words, I'd love to hear from you. Share your thoughts, ideas, or let's chat about the possibility of an interview. If you're into writing blurbs or reviews, your insights are more than welcome. Let's create something meaningful together. Shoot me a message and let the conversation begin.
