Where Stephen Kampa’s award-winning first book, Cracks in the Invisible, wrestled with silence (particularly the silence of God) and how to fill it, his second book addresses solitude. The poems here explore various permutations of intimacy and isolation in contemporary culture and juxtapose them with the difficult models of intimacy and fruitful solitude championed by earlier traditions. Throughout, poetic craft provides a vehicle for a transcendence that is part faith, part laughter.
Stephen Kampa was born in Missoula, Montana, in 1981 and grew up in Daytona Beach, Florida. His first book, Cracks in the Invisible, won the 2010 Hollis Summers Poetry Prize and the 2011 Gold Medal in Poetry from the Florida Book Awards. His poems have also been awarded the Theodore Roethke Prize, first place in the River Styx International Poetry Contest, and two Pushcart nominations.