Grant Clauser writes wise and pleasing poems about “the beautiful and crumbling world.” Here you’ll find reflections of a life firmly grounded, planted and growing, one that celebrates tomatoes and daughters and pawpaws and brook trout and sunflowers equally, while never forgetting to mourn what is always passing from us.

—Todd Davis, author of Ditch Memory: New & Selected Poems

Line by line, these poems produce moments of pristine beauty, of snow falling “like moth wings,” that simply stunt your breath. More than all that, these lines offer connection and hope (hope so pure you can taste it!) no matter what losses we face, no matter what might strafe our lives or our planet. The best gift Clauser’s poems give us, though, is the reminder to breathe slowly and to “sit down in the cool morning and talk ourselves patiently into the world.” For this reminder, and for this poet, I am profoundly grateful.

—Jack B. Bedell, author of Ghost Forest, Poet Laureate of Louisiana, 2017-2019

In the tradition of Hopkins, Frost, and Oliver, Grant Clauser’s nature poems open to the great mystery of what it means to be alive on this “slightly crooked” earth. In Temporary Shelters Clauser traverses the world as we know it, including “its hungry jaws,” its “ruins on the one hand,/ succession on the other.” And while the world “teaches us every day,” about our own absences, heartaches, and hope, in Clauser’s deft hands, nature also remains inimitably itself.

— Ethel Rackin, author of In Time