Review Ron Kolm s Swimming in the Shallow End is a touching, beautiful collection. Kolm offers a savvy mix of short, pithy poems; seemingly straight-ahead anecdotes; and mysterious poems like What Remains, The Argonaut and The Ascension. Refreshingly free of pyrotechnics, Swimming in the Shallow End is a very human snapshot of our current moment. Peter Bushyeager, author of Citadel Luncheonette, editor of Wake Me When It s Over: Selected Poems of Bill Kushner --Back cover blurb As we live our lives, we encounter many stories, episodes and even dramas. But usually they come and go, mostly unnoticed or forgotten. Ron Kolm captures those tiny gem-like bits of life and transforms them into poems. His language is simple, perfectly fit for the fleeting feelings of their ordinariness. In the era of Pan (All) Demos (People), Swimming in the Shallow End will guide us through with its humble but deeply genuine humanism. Yuko Otomo, author of STUDY & Other Poems on Art, KOAN and Anonymous Landscape --Back cover blurb The very title of this book poses a contradiction. Swimming suggests the subconscious, the source of creativity. The shallow end, however, suggests safety because, after all, these poems are a paean to mortality. Ron Kolm searches for signs of life on a laptop. He deifies a great poet in The Ascension of John Ashbery, who s passing marked not only a death but also a shift in poetics. This collection, ultimately, is a study in Eros versus Thanatos. Kolm learns from his heroes in order to grow and to achieve a state of in sui generis. As readers, we become Kolm s devotees, learning from each word, each line break, each explosive pause. Dean Kostos, author of The Boy Who Listened to Paintings --Backcover blurb About the Author Ron Kolm is a contributing editor of Sensitive Skin magazine. Ron is the author of Divine Comedy, Duke & Jill, Suburban Ambush, Night Shift, A Change in the Weather and Welcome to the Barbecue. He