Unlooked For

The poems in Lex Runciman’s Unlooked For arise from the felt sense that experience – whatever it is – goes by too quickly, leaving little chance for real consideration or sufficient understanding. What did we just see, or hear? What happened? What do we make of it? What does it make of us?

Yet amid such daily haste and distraction, we must make choices – thoughtful or spontaneous, conscious or mysterious, frivolous or life changing. How do we negotiate the moral and mortal complexities? How might we inquire and reflect? And crucially, how might we talk back?

The poems in Unlooked For embrace image and voice, loss and its consolations, the light and the dark. They range from Oregon to Ireland, and Velasquez to Virginia Woolf, from slugs to hissy possums to dogwoods and iris "like silks / draped all over themselves." Written in a time when public utterance has too often become coarsened, accusatory, selfish, or plainly false, the poems in Unlooked For work to establish and maintain “a margin of trust.”