In this elegant collection, D. Nurkse elegizes a lost father, a foreshortened childhood, and
a young marriage. From the drenched lawns of suburbia to the streets of Brooklyn, he delivers up the small but crucial epiphanies that propel an American coming-of-age and chronicles the development of a tender yet exacting consciousness. As the diversions of childhood prefigure the heartbreak of adulthood, Nurkse captures the exquisite sadness of each small “fall” that carries us further from our early innocence. In the book’s final section, the poet turns to face mortality with a series of stirring poems about illness in midlife. Throughout, Nurkse celebrates the sheer strangeness of our perceptions in a language that is both astute and surpassingly lyrical.
“Nurkse, former poet laureate of Brooklyn, excels at conveying . . . [a] kind of unaccompanied loneliness . . . [He] soberly relates the cruelties of the world.”
–Time Out New York
“D. Nurkse’s The Fall features three highly personal sequences of poems concerning death, love, and illness. Their drama and the universality of their themes draw us in . . . The Fall–mystical, mesmerizing, elegant–is a cat’s eye of a collection.”
–Bill Christophersen, Poetry
“D. Nurkse, despite his modesty, seems to be weaving poetry’s various movements towards a cohesive zenith, which takes him beyond characterization. He may be a contemporary poet, but his words will live beyond him.”
–Anne Hamilton, Memphis Commercial Appeal
“A collection of exquisitely-shaped poems highlighted by the poet’s gift for delicate yet piercing epiphanies.”
–Dennis Loy Johnson, Athens Banner-Herald
“Nurkse’s style is simple, almost conversational, yet underneath the words, the reader senses great emotion.”
–Library Journal
