Praise for A Marriage Book "James Lenfestey, after a lifetime of attentive writing, has lately done poems for family and marriage that put most of us to shame." -- Gary Snyder, New York Times Book Review "Warning Label: prepare to be shaken, moved, amused, terrified, relieved, delighted. Take in small doses or one large gulp; either way, you will be healed. These poems are alive with many things--stories, images, metaphors--but more than anything else they are alive with rhythm. These are poems of mutual passion, but also of heartbreak and solitude. In the final stanza of 'My Wife Sleeping as I Drive,' James P. Lenfestey writes: 'We plunge along our course of earth, / each alert in our own way, / ahead the blue black sky full /of oncoming lights and stars. How amazing that we have been invited along for the ride!'" --Jim Moore, author of Prognosis "I've been an avid reader of James P.
Lenfestey's work for many years. His Seeking the Cave was a wonder. And so is his Marriage Book , a collection rooted in passion, desire, sensuality, and the 'shared heat' of love. This is above all a book of transcendence, of celebration. Containing a wealth of extraordinary poems, it appears to have been conceived in a beautiful sustained burst of illumination, Lenfestey overlapping his themes to create a collection so seamless it could well be read as one long poem. This is a truly superb book, an absolute joy to read." --Robert Hedin, author of Traveling Light "These tender, sly, plainspoken poems are a profound (and sexy) hymn to a long marriage. James Lenfestey writes of domestic matters, yes, but the poems are most definitely undomesticated.
They tell a thousand small secrets in an extended meditation on love and all its consequences. They also chart the history of a complex emotion over many years, which I found fascinating. Tonally nuanced, fresh and far-ranging, the voice in these poems is a delight." --Chase Twichell, author of Things as It Is Praise for Seeking the Cave "A lively account of James P. Lenfestey's trip to China, which includes a visit to the cave where Han-shan actually lived, a number of Chinese poems written 1,200 years ago, and poems of his own written on the trail to Cold Mountain. It unites our brief literary life with the ancient richness of Chinese culture." --Robert Bly, author of Like the New Moon, I will Live My Life "A profound, and profoundly personal book. It's very captivating, warm and friendly, personal, unguarded, idiosyncratic, pointed but also finally apolitical, and eminently charming.
" --Gary Snyder, author of The Present Moment "James P. Lenfestey's ranging, big-hearted book of pilgrimage and quest recounts the meeting of two poets, one a twentieth-century American, the other a surprisingly gregarious T'ang Dynasty hermit known for both his poems of deep solitude and the warmth of his friendships. The story of Lenfestey's late-life search for his own self's unfolding portrait is, in happy sympathy, replete with deft portraits of others, from the translator-scholars Burton Watson and Bill Porter to the sincere and enterprising Buddhist nuns opening a new shrine and its accompanying gift shop. Seeking the Cave intertwines landscape and language, poetry and prose, foodstuffs and culture, and above all, the explorations of inner life made outward, step by step, on the steep paths of China's cities and mountains." --Jane Hirshfield, author of Ledger.