BOOK PUBLISHED: “Ragpicking Ezekiel’s Bones” by Pamela Sumners

UnCollected Press and The Raw Art review presents the rich and powerful poetry of Pamela Sumners. The poems of Ragpicking Ezekiel’s Bones are a thrilling experience of how many unique and exceptional ways a poem can be built by a poet who artfully applies the full spectrum of literary tools at her disposal. No two poems are alike. Every poem is replete with complex ideas and adroitly applied forms. Pamela Sumners is an expert with all the literary tools. The reader who immerses herself/himself in these poems is bound to find finely wrought poems that, often leave you shaken, dumbfounded and wondering just what has happened. Sure, go ahead and sit yourself down in your favorite overstuffed chair in front of the fire. Take a slug of your coffee or tea. But try not to get comfortable – and definitely avoid getting complacent. You will need all your wits and skills for this book. You will not be disappointed. This is a read like no other. See what William Slaughter has to say below:

All the world’s a poem for Pamela Sumners. In Ragpicking Ezekiel’s Bones, she practices what might be called “the poetics of inclusion.” How to get everything in . . .is the challenge she sets for herself, and Ragpicking is all the proof I require that she is way more than up to that challenge. Sumners’ work is “immodest,” in the highest and best sense of the word, and ambitious, an increasingly rare virtue in an age of small poems. She writes “large” poems, poems that “contain multitudes.” She manages, somehow, to get all manner of folks into them, and all her “folk” have stories to tell, stories motivated by desire, by “urgency and longing”—the same motivation that readers should bring to her book. The reward for such readers of Ragpicking Ezekiel’s Bones will be memorable, even indelible, lines and whole poems that will not let you leave them, that will stay with you and stay with you, all your life.”

—William Slaughter, editor of Mudlark: An Electronic Journal of Poetry & Poetics and author of The Politics of My Heart and Untold Stories