About Footprints: Poems

Braiding the personal and historic, the philosophic and scientific, Footprints by Richard Jackson takes us from conflicts in places like Ukraine, Sudan, Gaza, Ethiopia and the American south to a kind of transcendent and redemptive vision. Guiding it all is a kind of jazz improvisation that follows the lead of musicians like Ben Webster and Wayne Shorter, and that gathers fragments into an inclusiveness and wholeness that Tomaž Šalamun called “a vulnerable voice that blossoms and transforms us.”

Praise for Footprints: Poems

Spiritually illuminated histories. “Conversation with myself during an evening walk about a truth yet to be named”: Footprints imprint a path up to cathedrals that bleed into surrounding clouds. Each moment, here, builds a telescope strong enough to see beyond the universe as easily as spotting a crow in an empty sky where everything that’s missing stays missing. These poems leave us with a compelling invitation to start over again, from the beginning.

—Earl Braggs