Coming Home with Cancer

Cameron Morse confronts hard truths and transforms them. These poems offer readers faith in life and in art—a medical diagnosis and the clinical procedures that it involves can be shoved aside. We have here a poet whose craft and strength of will proceed toward beauty, family, and birth. These poems grow in stature and distinction by elevating seemingly mundane details of life. Instead of listening only, and merely, to God’s voice in the wind, Morse says, “I hear / a hiss in the oak leaves / like rice pouring into an empty pot.” Such stunning imagery allows us readers to live more intensely. The generational vitality that celebrates a new son and laments a missing father, for example, finds language that is both human and steady: “But Dad,” says the poet, “If you aren’t / coming, I will take your place.” Cameron Morse is a gifted poet, whose poems are a gift to the rest of us.

—Robert Stewart, Working Class.