Reviews
Review by: Matt W. Miller, author of TENDER THE RIVER - May 19, 2025
"With a naturalist's sense of ecology and concision, Denton Loving weaves out of this world both allegory and immediacy, a place where you can be both hurt and healed, and where you must unbramble all the truths of living through this earth. Loving's precision of line and sentence, of image and sound, render poems where 'Each bud swells and splits / and unfurls into leaves // and fruit. A tender explosion!' At once timely and timeless, FELLER is a superbly striking and essential book."
Review by: Elaine Sexton, author of SITE SPECIFIC - May 19, 2025
"Denton Loving makes lyric sense of complex issues in poem after poem in FELLER, with his special blend of eco-poetics and earthly reason. Read this book for its verbal delights, even in heartbreak, where the speaker notes how 'even a tree has desire,' and is able to 'praise the quake of the earth accepting its weight.'"
Review by: Annie Woodford, author of WHERE YOU COME FROM IS GONE - May 19, 2025
"These poems shimmer and shapeshift like the dual meaning inherent in the collection's title. So too do the speakers in these poems, who are both vulnerable humans and conduits through which lyrical ecstasy passes. These are love poems, loss poems, poems that 'open doors to new worlds.' They refuse an easy sentimentality. FELLER is defined by its abundance, by the 'bright tapestry' of its intricately crafted sonic pleasures. Underlying the human 'language of grief' and Loving's attentive reverence for the natural world is this music, which is always 'a newly alive thing.' Reading FELLER is a transformative, joyful, loneliness-alleviating experience."