Inside the Golden Days of Missing You

by Nate Logan

With the kiss of a knuckleballer and a heart of gravy, Nate Logan’s full-length poetry debut is sweet to its friends and squinting at the clouds.

Ready to feel any which way besides a haunted lumberyard, beelining toward the finger sandwiches of Midwestern self-reflection. The sky needs a good lint-rolling. On the ostrich festival gates is a note that reads: I’M SORRY.

Genres: Poetry

74 pages, Paperback

Published March 14, 2019

Reviews

[Nate · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wrote it so I think it's alright.

[Jessica]

Nate Logan has a voice on the page like none I've ever encountered. In this collection, imagination reigns supreme. A narrator imagines the names of beer "spelled out in front of me in thirstier and thirstier fonts." A splotch of mustard on a sweater becomes a vehicle for imagining the radiance of a dancer, "slipping/ into each night's rapture." It's hard to overstate the creativity and inventiveness in Logan's poems. Moon rocks are put into mouths, a dachshund takes a stand upon the narrator's liver, a "bad title" from the DMV becomes the "Bad Title" of a poem. One poem is in the shape and sensibility of a slot machine, another examines the distance between violence and peace as the distance of a bayonet. A beautiful, thought-provoking, and utterly unique collection.

[Benjamin Niespodziany · Rating 5 out of 5]

This debut collection of poems (and Logan's work, in general) has my heart. Maybe it’s because he’s a fellow Hoosier. Maybe it’s because I see him as part of a family with James Tate and Michael Earl Craig, as if they’re all surrounded by cornfields and tall boys. This book is full of lyrically dense, crystalline sentences, forever with the slyest of smirks. I fucking love that smirk.

[Elizabeth Moffett · Rating 5 out of 5]

This might be my first book of poetry on GoodReads. I enjoyed the wit, and my favorite poem was probably the last one called “Sometimes A Pony Gets Depressed.”

[Kara Dorris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Leveraging an insightful and undeniable voice, Nate Logan’s Inside the Golden Days of Missing You won’t let us just skim the surface or ignore what is directly in front of us; instead of coasting along, these poems collect, hunt and gather what is often overlooked or disregarded. Think about what possessions perch on our mantles, bookshelves, coffee tables; the premise is we have no need for “straw wrappers” or a “wooden duck” because these abandoned trinkets can give us nothing in return. But in these pages, the speaker takes in many abandoned and orphaned moments, feelings, ideas, objects, and then shows us that the things we carry, or adopt, knowingly or not, define us.

for the whole review at Barrelhouse: https://www.barrelhousemag.com/online....