Praise for Late Life

“Ackerman’s poems radiate lyric energy. They illuminate love and desire, the flux of the present and the flow of memory, as well as devastating loss and its aftermath. His use of refrain and repetition is incantatory and even his darkest poems possess a startling beauty. Experience is perfectly balanced with imagination, the art of storytelling with the art of song: this is a masterful collection.”

—- Jennifer Barber

“From the very first moment that I read Stephen Ackerman’s poems—which is now over forty years ago—I was dazzled by his abstract lyricism and his deadpan/everyman declarative humor. What we love so deeply in Koch and O’Hara is intricately woven through the rich fabric of Stephen Ackerman’s poetry. Poignant and pointed, sensual and psalm-like, this is work that is capacious, powerful and relentlessly generous in its vision of our world. To hold the poems of Late Life in my hands has made me deliriously happy.”

—- David St. John

“At last! A book by Stephen Ackerman, whose poems I’ve been admiring—no, loving—for years as they’ve come out in magazines. Reading them all together now feels like a revelation about all that poetry can do, and be. Exuberant and sensual love poems, tender short lyrics, touching elegies, poems of praise, sorrow, childhood, marriage, fatherhood, friendship, celebrations of poetry itself. What binds them together is the voice—now playful, now wistful, now more somber, but always fresh—of a faithful, generous, and affectionate speaker who finds the sweet spot between candor and mystery, between the deeply personal and ‘the grammar of other lives,’ between subject matter and formal invention, who always surprises but never shows off, and always invites us to accompany him on his lively imaginative excursions, or just to sit with him quietly and look, listen, and remember. Late Life may be late in coming, but it is indeed full of life, of ‘the unstable beauty of living.’ I certainly felt more alive while reading it. Its publication is an occasion not just for celebration but for rejoicing.”

— Jeffrey Harrison

“We could never have Late Life soon enough. Arriving in a tide from decades’ long study, intuition, and invention, these poems crest with sagacity, lyricism, page-inflaming eroticism, heart-breaking pathos, humility and wit. ‘You were in the import/ Export business’ Ackerman says in “Ode to Poetry,” and his alliances with language’s inner soul and outward sound—early to the revelation of any moment—carry us to the depths of meaning in the human condition.”

—- Jessica Greenbaum