Vagrants & Accidentals

"The University of Washington Press’ Pacific Northwest Poetry Series has shepherded a gorgeous new collection of Craft’s poetry into being: Vagrants & Accidentals, which feels like a book that’s been bottled up for a decade, just waiting to be introduced to an unsuspecting world. The poetry in Vagrants is eager and obsessed with big ideas like evolution and the act of becoming. . . . Craft argues that without the eyes to see and the lips to speak and the fingers to write, the world may as well not have existed at all. On that same wavelength, a Seattle without Craft’s poetry in it would be a forgettable dot on a map. He breathes life into our world, as an editor, a publisher, and most definitely as a poet."

"I admire the weave of the personal narratives with the richly textured imagination that consistently ignites the moment. Vagrants & Accidentals is a book of full-measures, with a mind behind its heart."

"It is not news that 'things fly out of our hands,' as Kevin Craft writes in Vagrants & Accidentals. Rather it’s the insistent attention this wonderful poet pays as those things fly—and their beautiful 'fugitive' remnants, our recollections in their absence—that marks the soulful, lyric richness of his new book. Vagrants and accidentals are, he reminds us, terms for wayward birds and musical miscues, but Craft deepens the conceit as he traces the constant surprises of nature, family, and social engagement, until 'on a scale of extravagant / to frugal, we fall everywhere / between.' Dislocation and disruption become like guideposts in his poems, not to be ignored but heard, heeded, and embraced in the natural disorder of things. It’s all part of Craft’s patient, shining wisdom."

"‘I do my part / to hold up one loose end of it,’ writes Kevin Craft at the start of the luminous ‘One Atmosphere’—but the lovely and wistful poems of Vagrants & Accidentals belie this modest beginning and find Craft doing so much more than one poet’s small part. Everything and nothing is accidental in these poems, in which the sudden appearance of an exotic songbird, of the memory of a parent, of Mark Rothko’s ghost, or of any of the other varieties of beauty that populate this precious, pluralistic, and precarious planet might befall or confront us at any moment."

"Kevin Craft’s Vagrants & Accidentals is by turns melancholic, enigmatic, and tender. The camera swoops and veers from poem to poem, surveying the liminal spaces between outer and inner landscape, both civilized and wild. And Craft’s impastoed, often-impressionistic lyrics are delivered via incantatory wit and wordplay that never fail to surprise and delight. Read these poems out loud, and loudly."

"Evoking the steadfastness of calendrical weeks and a card deck’s volatility, these 52+1 poems meditate on the unforeseen directions a life can take. Like the prism that serves as a quietly recurring trope, these poems are sites of gather and scatter, as flickers of classical beauty get projected out of fracture. An encomium to drift that places figures 'steeped in disappearance' in the foreground of its long, historical view, Vagrants & Accidentals suggests that being blown off course is the course."

"There is nature on the pages, there is heartbreak set in loved landscapes, there is archaeological wonder. . . . Kevin Craft tends the Pacific Northwest’s garden of verses. And his work is vital to our poetic health."