Call & Response

“His poetry moves with seeming casualness and ease, and yet it deftly opens deep and complex issues of identity — identity explored in the dimensions of race, family, generation, sex, psychology, and religion . . . [an] impressive first book.” —<em>The Hudson Review</em> “Precise and controlled, these poems have wit and intelligence: they are never sentimental or arch. Empathy and love pervade them: one feels throughout them that father, mother, brothers and sister, aunts and uncles, grandparents and elder, and ancestors have equal claims to be heard. And this, far from being a burden, is the source of the poems’ great wisdom: for if all these souls in the continuum of souls have a right to be heard, so does the son and poet.” —<em>American Book Review</em> “Forrest Hamer’s <em>Call & Response</em> is a tightly woven tapestry of impulses and life rituals, a tribute to what keeps us whole and true to human complexity. In essence, this wonderful collection is about bridges: between cultures, individuals, gender, parts of oneself, human beings and nature, family, etc. There’s an interior-exterior odyssey here. Hamer isn’t afraid of those everyday feelings. His best poems are calls int