Beyond the Reach: Poems
Deborah Cummins shows us how lovely--truly elegant--and frightening it is to
experience the moments where the natural and human worlds intersect and inevitably
and achingly part. Beyond the Reach is a remarkable first book, reaching far
beyond most, because of the distilled clarity and beauty of its language and its
highly intelligent and haunting philosophical range. -- Susan Hahn
Cummins is a poet with both hands in plain sight. No manipulative literary affectations,
no illustrations of theory, no personal mission other than to address us directly,
with clarity, authenticity and, above all, with generosity. What book of poems could be
a better friend than this one, with its lovely, articulate, genuine voice? --Ted Kooser
In her exhilarating debut collection Deborah Cummins captures "this luminosity, this
voracious clarity" that suffuses her keenly observed and richly imagined universe. With
equal and abiding affection for the human and natural worlds, these poems confront regret,
loss, and difficult revision, with blessing, grace, mercy, praise, and the promise of
redemption. --Ronald Wallace
Beyond the Reach takes its cadence from the sea, its sounds from birds--indigo
bunting to robin to grackle to flicker to the "high trills" of the sandhill cranes. Its canny
speaker does not flinch from pain, preferring to partake fully of the world's "inhuman
beauty." Deborah Cummins takes us well beyond the reach--into the deep, uncharted expanses
of the heart. Quite simply, these finely crafted poems "bear the weight of being strong."
--Judith Kitchen
Deborah Cummins is the author of a poetry chapbook, From the Road It Looks Like
Paradise. Her awards include James A. Michener and Donald Barthelme fellowships, the
Washington Prize in Fiction, the Headwaters Literary Prize, Illinois Art Council fellowships
and awards, and fellowships from Yaddo, MacDowell, Ragdale, and Virginia Center for the
Creative Arts. Now president of the Modern Poetry Association, she has also been an
Arts-in-Education artist with the Illinois Arts Council, writer-in-residence at the Menil
Collection museum in Houston, Texas, and lecturer at the University of Chicago. She has
directed writing workshops at Northwestern University and at Chicago's Museum of
Contemporary Art, Terra Museum of American Art, and Newberry Library. She resides with her
husband, Bob, in Evanston, Illinois, and Deer Isle, Maine.
A recorded interview with this author is available from New Letters on the Air.
