To Leave for Our Own Country

The poems in TO LEAVE FOR OUR OWN COUNTRY offer a new approach to place-based writing and thought in an often uprooted age. Ranging from the shores of Lake Michigan to the small towns of Iowa and Indiana, and finally landing in the heart of New York City, they follow the course of the American small-town diaspora across three decades of a life, from childhood to the cusp of parenthood, asking what it means to belong to a landscape or community that one is constantly destined to leave. Bringing together the personal, political, historical, and spiritual, and filtering them all through the particularities of place and of his neighbors, human and nonhuman, author John Linstrom celebrates the grace of quiet moments and comings-together as he mourns the dislocations and inhuman rendings of a postmodern world. In attending to each place and stage in life with care and listening for new wisdom everywhere, some leavings take on the character of a return, and some returns have the power to release old pains. In our moment of climate crisis and amid cynical challenges to democracy, each rooted in systems of oppression and inequality, such a departure seems both urgent and necessary to turn the world toward healing.

"Though what we commonly consider sacred in religious terms is referenced in this moving and love-filled collection, that tradition is eclipsed by a higher, wider, and more ethereal reach. The poems here provide a record of the poet's always sudden and brief yet bright encounters with that unknown mystical realm--the texture of water as it falls against the shore, the sound of a snapped tree branch, the recollection of a childhood walk to school and the influence of weather on the meaning of such a walk."--Maurice Manning

"Wise, clear-eyed, and exquisitely musical, John Linstrom's assured debut creates its own weather. Reading TO LEAVE FOR OUR OWN COUNTRY, I felt the snow and rain, the welcome sun at the storm's end, the long dark and the long day, the endings that lead--always--to new beginnings, the pure, bright, melodic holiness of the moment and what it might teach us."--Joe Wilkins

"John Linstrom's elegantly written book of poetry opens our hearts and minds to a cosmic world of spiritual resonance. In this spectacular debut volume, Linstrom moves through geographies and the full liturgical calendar, the full circle of human experience--from love, marriage and parenthood, to loss of elders. He writes of the loss of our environment through climate change and the ways that we can create awareness of our dilemma. Then, through his visionary final poem, he directs us, with his mastery of metaphor, to leave for our own country by another road."--Mary Swander

"The natural world unfolds in ongoing changes of light and violent storms and moments of sheer sunrise and moonlit beauty as patient humans sustain their lives in John Linstrom's lovely collection, TO LEAVE FOR OUR OWN COUNTRY These poems are about surviving and sheltering in each other, but they are also about stopping to notice, to remember, to honor, and to mourn the troubling signs of a changing climate."--Debra Marquart

Poetry.