REVIEWS:

“Lane Falcon’s Deep, Blue Odds focuses the attention on the wailful choir of the fragility of early life. These poems speak of the urgency of being born: the risks and dangers of being born at odds with a healthy body, at odds with the world, and needing extreme intervention and care in infancy. The odor of how delicate babies are, and what it means to be a family is renewed in poem after poem. With unblinking ferocity, Falcon maximizes the vertical tension of the line with the horizontal tension of the sentence with pulse and precision.”

––Sean Singer, author of Discography, winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition
and the Norma Farber First Book Award in 2001

“Lane Falcon’s Deep, Blue Odds takes us into a mother’s surveillance of and perseverance and love for her children, her son’s first few years of life challenged as “He arrives / in a mold too small to hold / this cosmic injury: his paralyzed airway.” Striking imagery and surprising metaphor flourish as we are drawn further into Falcon’s poetic narrative of illness, medical necessity, and hope for a family not ready to give up as they live “inside an eye— / the cornea receiving dull, / morning light.” And illness meets faith as mother speaker grapples with how long it will take for her son to breathe on his own and speak, for her daughter to forgive herself for not being the superhero who could cure her brother, and for all of them to learn how to thrive even though they live amid the most astounding odds.”

––Theresa Senato Edwards, author of Becoming Couldn’t Sing for Anyone