Fletcher’s latest collection plunges into the shadowy, personal recesses of the mind. Uncover the hidden confessions within this public ‘Confessional’, confront truths many prefer to leave unspoken, and seek the happiness we often bury as deep as our sorrows.
“We are creatures of secrets,” Fletch Fletcher pens, each page of this book forming a “space of white / that is my confessional.” These self-examinations by someone mourning a father’s absence, “the impotence of prayer,” and the solitude of being an outsider, who visualises “the sound the sky made / when it first saw the ocean fill itself” and “dawn through ruffled eggshell drapes,” draw inspiration from both the Beat movement and Goethe’s stormy romanticism. Fletcher tilts towards affirmation, recalling “untilled plains, / clean and free / of headstones” while acknowledging that “confession and storytelling are both true / to the soul if not always / to the tongue.” ‘Confessional’ is a collection that is both starkly honest and deeply moving. —Michael Waters, author of Caw
In the essential honesty of ‘Confessional’, Fletch Fletcher strips back the façade nearly suffocated by myths of masculinity, assesses the burden of lineage, exposes the isolation of depression, and shows how the self can be an ocean that fills itself, that draws in primal fear and shame and then propels a breath into a storm // into other lungs. Indeed, these poems are ones whose testimony transforms the breath; read them with a pen at the ready. Fletcher unearths truths from the brine-drenched earth of concealed knowledge and questions both himself and us: Do you remember how you felt / when your skin was open sky, / untilled plains, / clean and free / of headstones? I eagerly await your experience of this book. —Darla Himeles, author of Cleave
Fletch Fletcher has harnessed an intimate and soul-rending medium, the confessional, to convert the unrefined vitality of lived experience into poetry. “…it must be true first that confession is an energy before you / can understand how laws work…so I marked and measured and buried mine / let them seep slowly.” You are about to delve into the work of a poet who feels deeply; a poet committed to the shadow work of excavation and revelation to create poetry that is rapturous in its perception. —Roberto Carlos Garcia, author of What Can I Tell You? Selected Poems (Flowersong Press)
Presales are available until June 28th at www.Fletcherpoet.com or www.Finishinglinepress.com. The book will be dispatched on August 23rd.
