Biblical Proportions (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798901467213)

What a pleasure it is to read the surprising, revelatory and really enjoyable poems in N.S. Boone's Biblical Proportions. There's an exuberance here that's rarely found in contemporary poetry, as well as the audacity, even courage, to explore subjects beyond the merely personal - to investigate metaphysical and nakedly religious terrain, not in order to proselytize, but instead to accomplish what true poetry always strives for: exploration and engagement with the eternal, unanswerable questions that are fundamental to our human being. Boone's formal audacity is at once fresh and surprisingly new, even while it harkens back to certain of the masters of Modernist and post-modernist American poetry, writers who employed "open-field" and "breath-measured" form to discover voices and even inner selves that would not have been available to them had they not challenged their language to go beyond itself. While Boone is in the lineage of Williams, Duncan, Olson, and even Levertov, his cadences, revelations, and voice(s) are his own. Biblical Proportions is a genuine achievement.

-Michael Hettich, author, The Halo of Bees: New and Selected Poems, 1990-2022 and A Sharper Shadow

N.S. Boone's collection examines the space that we are given as well as the space that we make, with attention to those edges. How do we create forms to hold everything, each part and the whole and the hole that often is our grasping? Come any kind of flesh, snapdragon or speaker or beloved, and what impacts it, chainsaw or time or the divine, each poem acts to consider each voice and each instance. In Boone's work, such consideration does not yield a static final answer but is itself meaning.

-Angie Macri, author, Sunset Cue and Underwater Panther