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$17.00 (+ $3 s/h)

First Edition (August 10, 2017)
ISBN-13: 978-1947465039
Trade Paper
6" x 9"
127 pages

Published by  Kelsay Books
Cover Artwork by Jan Boles

LICHEN SONGS:
New and Selected Poems

Pulitzer prize 2018 entrant
Fifty-one poems reprinted from earlier books. Ten poems published and collected here for the first time, along with 18 new and unpublished poems.

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PRAISE FOR LICHEN SONGS

“George Venn, one of the best-known and most respected poets in the state, won the [Andres Berger Poetry Award] for “The Emperor Breeds Only on the Ice.”
                                     —Jeff Baker, The Oregonian

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“There is no sentimentality here, no nostalgia for the mud....He knows the land, how stubborn and capricious it can be.... This awareness, mixed as it is with the subtly metaphysical, allows for an ease free of the misty romanticism of much recent poetry.”                                                    —Vern Rutsala, Willamette Week

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“George Venn is a master of the detail that exudes the spirit of place, of time, of the hopes and joys of the human soul.”
                                                   —Karen Swenson, The Cold Counsel

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“Venn is a poet of great heart for the majesty of place and creatures, of water running and the old trees still standing, for epics of the first people and those who came later, for the wilderness gone and the wilderness still left—inside and outside us.”
                                                   —Primus St. John, Communion

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Notes for Lichen Songs

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“In Lichen Songs George Venn, veteran Pacific Northwest scholar and bard, collects his poems that observe both sides of the wet-dry (West-East) divide. If you want to taste the rural Northwest on your tongue, turn to Venn’s poems.”
                                                   —O. Alan Weltzien, Exceptional Mountains

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“What a detective of place George Venn is; how private his eyes are! Yet in Lichen Songs you come to know what a good man can make known, what an avid man can feel, and what, in George Venn's hands, the craft of poetry can do. He magnifies the landscape and what he sees turns to music—a choir of wheeling nature, students, family, lovers, still rooms. You will find much to care for in this bright man's new and selected work.”
                                                   —Dan Lamberton, On the River Through the Valley of Fire

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“This is poetry of big love, great heart. George Venn's scale is immense and inclusive…. Like Tom McGrath, George Venn tells the stories of his region in such a way as to make them magical, luminous, and permanent…”
                                                   —James Bertolino, Ravenous Bliss