Ken Haas’ BORROWED LIGHT coming soon!

Borrowed Light, Ken Haas’ first collection of poems, is complex, vibrant, capacious and wildly imaginative. With affection and wonderful clarity, Haas describes a childhood of “taking infield practice and shagging flies,” Atlantic City’s “sunburn and saltwater taffy,” a trip into Manhattan to see the legendary John Coltrane, who “emptied his arms in a wave that even now speaks to the kind of man I could become.” But it would be a mistake to call this book nostalgic. Haas is keenly aware of the darker forces of history. The same anti-Semitism that forced his grandparents to flee Nazi Germany is alive and well today— “we just forgot that shirt-wise brown is brown, words do burn, and we can see the rest from here.” Yet what emerges overall is a celebration of the immigrant. Peopled with men and women from El Salvador, China, Mexico, Philippines. Borrowed Light is an invitation to empathy, an embrace of the stranger, a sanctuary. —Ellen Bass, Author of Indigo

From a Bronx childhood and adolescence these poems chart a wide-ranging narrative, lit by well-drawn images, through the second part of the 20th Century into our present fractured moment: family portraits and songs of romance, ironic meditations on age and ethnicity, homilies on loneliness and companionship. This is a compassionate voice, full of an appreciation for life and laced with an undercurrent of humor, unmistakably American.
—Joseph Millar, Author of Kingdom