Praise for The Color of a New Country
The poems in The Color of a New Country are brilliant, memorable, and affirming of what happens to the human spirit as it journeys through this life. Mr. Knorr is writing at the peak of his powers as a poet. These poems are not going to leave you alone during or after you read them. This is possibly one of the most affecting and hauntingly beautiful collections of poems I have read in a while. The father-son poems resonate with such amazing clarity they will move you beyond the page and into the reveries of your own life in fatherhood.
- Virgil Suarez
Praise for The Third Body
These are quiet yet intense poems celebrating family life, making the domestic universal and yet conversely, making external observations personal…And what could be more fresh than an American male voice in the new century singing stalwartly about happiness and love? I am totally captivated and convinced!
- Marilyn Chin, author of Rhapsody in Plain Yellow
Jeff Knorr's The Third Body flexes considerable centripetal muscle, pulling every earthly thing within the poet's ample embrace. Here, the "wonder of . . . things" brims within beloved wife and son and aging dog, within an ancient river, quiet horses, and the autumn orchard. Knorr evokes a world so ripe its fullness bursts into rot or flame, a cycle of richness forever on the verge. This welcome collection's lesson, its "terrible secret," is the knowledge that to love is to consume and to be consumed, a merging of bodies both enthralling and redemptive. This is a strong, honest, and mature book.
- Kevin Stein, author of American Ghost Roses and Illinois Poet Laureate
Jeff Knorr’s The Third Body is a book about openings, spaces made and lost, and the knowing that in our living and leaving, in our awareness and inevitable absence, crouches a fear that love too will turn to dust…. Read the entire review
- Lanie Wilt, for Coldfront Magazine
Praise for Keeper and Standing up to the Day
Keeper is a deftly modulated sequence of essays and poems that moves with grace between moments of high intensity and those of repose, between the personal and the communal, between earth and water. In this collection, stories and images are embedded in the frames of other stories and images, which are themselves framed by still others. They telescope into and out of one another in a way that captures precisely the texture of memory. This book is heartfelt in the best and most authentic sense of the word.
- Ted Leeson, author of The Habit of Rivers
In his new collection, Jeff Knorr guides his reader to the riverbank, to the hunt, to Orion’s belt, to the Texas Panhandle, to rodeos and roundups, to family court, to the bedroom, to the porch, and to all points west. The poems are quiet journeys with remarkable results. His readers traverse bridges between nature and human experience and are reminded that the truths of our lives exist within nature’s offerings if we are willing to look for such a deliverance. Each poem sets its cross hairs on our vulnerabilities and strengths. Knorr’s voice is of our time and place and is not to be denied.
- Tina D. Eliopulos, Poetry Editor, Red Rock Review
Jeff Knorr's new book Standing Up to the Day is a wonderful collection of poems. In their clear wisdom and simplicity, they show us a world alight with possibility between nature and all that is human. The best poems in this volume inspire us to live better, which is what reading good poetry is all about.
- Virgil Suarez, author of The Garabato Poems
Standing Up to the Day conjures those sacred moments when the human and natural worlds converge. Expect illuminating encounters with coyote and deer, jay and heron, meadowgrass and wisteria. In this compelling debut, Jeff Knorr bears witness to those magical occasions when we unburden our human loads and celebrate nature's grace.
- Craig Lesley, author of Winterkill and Stormriders
A.R. Ammons, James Wright, Robert Wrigley, Heather Allen, Richard Hugo, W.H. Auden, and a host of Zen poets all have given us a lot to think about in drawing the line between philosophical meditations and contemplations of the principles of nature. Jeff Knorr's Standing Up to the Day is full of ruminations of mystery. Nature is the foil, but it is the depth of our humanity that Knorr is after--and after in a unique and quiet poetry that refuses sensationalism or sentimentality. The flavor is California and male...but universal without the taint of machismo...voice lessons in the wilderness that manage to take the private public without the distortions of transfer. "We want to know / we have not wasted our days / waiting for the coming of spring."
- Scott Hightower, author of Tin Can Tourist
Knorr’s writing is both lyrical and relevant in that it measures the importance of not just nature but the abundance of nature around and inside us. He’s not just another granola-muncher espousing political agendas with graceful language; he’s a sportsman who attempts to understand a world that’s fading before our eyes.
- H. Lee Barnes, author of Gunning for Ho and The Lucky
