Forever Came Today
poems by Graham Lewis  Spring, 2004

Buy Forever Came Today $12.95
will ship upon publication, Spring, 2004

Advance praise for Forever Came Today:
"Forever Came Today pulses with life.  In language both plain and perfect, Graham Lewis gives us the world not as we'd
like it to be, but as it is.  He chooses characters that are
rarely heard in poems--bar brawlers and circus freaks and
town outcasts.  He chooses settings that are rarely
seen--the abandoned Atomic Drive-In and the Dixie Trucker
Heaven rest stop, as well as the prairie of the Midwest.
Lewis masterly reveals the inner life of those on the
fringes--illuminating not their freakishness, but their
humanity, and in doing so, enriching and enlarging our own."
 - Beth Ann Fennelly, author of Open House (Zoo Press) and Tender Hooks (forthcoming from W.W. Norton)

"It's about time the world saw a volume of Graham Lewis's poetry. In Forever Came Today Lewis chronicles a hard, timeless Midwest, a universe of whiskey, knives, incest, circus freaks, desperados, and the wisdom and suffering of outsiders. He does it brilliantly, without a trace of condescension. Above all, it is his characters who shine.  There is a stubborn beauty in Lewis's lines. See for yourself."
- Gerard Donovan, author of Schopenhauer's Telescope

Graham Lewis's poetry is set in desolate Midwestern towns where cruelty is always in season and the characters are destroyed by their own monsters--unforgiven people living in unforgiving places. One thinks of the town of Fingerbone in Marilynne Robinson's novel Housekeeping or Lasse Hallstrom's gorgeous movie What's Eating Gilbert Grape? These works are refreshing because they present a world unfamiliar to the mass media, where real bones are broken and dirt is on the sill.  Graham Lewis's version of the American Grotesque reminds me of the final scene of Hallstrom's movie, in which the obese mother, who has died after the effort of climbing her bedroom stairs, burns along with her house.  This is the lyricism of  "a fast car on a flat road" in which  "strangers rejoice you've finally come home."
-Paul Hoover, editor New American Writing

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