SAMANTHA DEFLITCH
PRAISE FOR CONFLUENCE
The way the poems pay attention to their neighbors, so to speak, is what fills the book with such painful grace, miracles that are gritty and raw. Buy this book for the people you love. Maybe also for the people you don’t love. It will give them hope.
—Mekeel McBride, author of Dog Star Delicatessen
These are poems of visiting the outskirts—the edges of rooms, deserts, amusement parks and cities. They’re about never fitting in and never knowing how to be in the moment, the reverberations of grief refusing to let us settle down. So what a surprise then, that Confluence also offers much in the way of consolation. Turns out that along
the peripheries is still plenty of wonder.
—Shelley Girdner, author You Were That White Bird
In Samantha DeFlitch's terrific debut Pittsburgh is a liminal ghost world made a place of transformation and possibility by way of exile and loneliness. Only Pittsburgh can be more than Pittsburgh, as Jack Gilbert taught us. DeFlitch has taken the lesson to heart.
—David Rivard, author of Standoff