Author Description

"After reading Gina Keicher's luminous collection of poems, I found myself thinking about America and about family, and about how those two words, so innocuous, so iconic and full of clear blue skies and yellow cornfields and white farm houses, how if they were pinned to a board and sliced in two, one could see the honeycombs of sadness and suffering and strangeness that would reveal themselves in cross section under close inspection, and I understood the woman in one of Gina's poems, who 'shined a bright light inside the cut to learn about sight, ' suddenly aware of the underlife. Attention to detail, unbridled imagination: these are the things of poetry, and they reside here in abundance at the nexus between the subconscious and the conscious, in the half-sleep, the waking dream, splat in the middle of the unsolved mystery of being alive." - Christopher Kennedy, author of Ennui Prophet// " 'All these colliding frequencies, ' Gina Keicher says in the gorgeous long poem, 'The General, ' that appears at the final section of this remarkable debut. Keicher herself is a radio that pulls in the escaping signals from the sideshows, peepshows, carnivals and sleeping nocturnal brains of America. It's complex and strange and endlessly fascinating. There is a weird connectivity and fearless fundamental seeking that goes on here where 'something always goes off' the family volcano, a pistol, a poem. These explorations are introductions into a body of knowledge which is also a body of mystery. Keicher kisses and wrestles her angels [her angles?] into submission, into a state of animal awareness." - Bruce Smith, author of Devotions// "You are holding more than a book of poems. These are missives from different dimensions, vital instructions to the moment; these are dreams floating in the atmosphere above us, transmuting the ordinary. Gina Keicher'sWilderness Champion lives up to its name and beyond. By reading this book you've already won something: a profound understanding of t