Chance Ransom

"Stein's poems are packed -- their languages colorful and richly textured, their casts of characters and bazaars of images wildly various... Stein is a writer of considerable talent. His poems are chockful of intelligence and eclectic learning, and display a knack for jazzy, syncopated rhythms; subtly effective buried rhymes; and breezily negotiated, abruptly-swerving, lengthy compound-complex sentences." -- Jim Simmerman, Colorado Review ADVANCE PRAISE "Kevin Stein's Chance Ransom possesses a narrative thrust that is instructive to the modern heart, and this haunting collection also shows us what we have often been cultivated to overlook. There's a deep seeing in Chance Ransom where forthrightness and honed beauty earn our trust. The everydayness of life is the foundation of this wonderful collection that troubles the waters of a kingdom out of reach and within us--the dualism of pathos and happiness that makes us whole." -- Yusef Komunyakaa From reviews of Kevin Stein's earlier collections: "[A] stunning debut collection in which men and women strive in vain toward goals that other people take for granted... No subject is taboo or profane for Stein." -- Publishers Weekly (starred review) "Kevin Stein's poems are treasure houses of the spirit. This superb storyteller braves the insidious, the irrational, the unpredictable, the dangerous in our common lives. What is amazing about the poems in his Bruised Paradise is the compassion that survives in them against all odds." -- John Knoepfle "Stein is a poet who knows how to transcribe not just the melodies and timbres of the physical world but also the 'throaty cry, our cry' that comes as we witness 'the gradual dispatch of the world we trust.'" -- Curt Rode, American Book Review