Sign-In
Cart
The Consolations
Paperback
ISBN13: 9781639808571
Publisher: Kelsay Books
Published: Nov 14 2025
Pages: 104
Weight: 0.33
Height: 0.25 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Solonche is productive and prolific, but that doesn't water down his poetry... He can compress a philosophical treatise into three lines... His epigrammatic tidy poems are philosophic gems. Solonche sees humor and encapsulates it; he frames a thought in perfect verse... He's playful and profound - the more he writes, the more he seems to know. Beneath the Solonche simplicity are significant social comments, and his goodwill reinforces the best in us.
-Grace Cavalieri, Washington Independent Review of Books
Solonche, an accomplished poet, employs various forms in this compilation, including haiku, prose poem, and free verse. The poems often imaginatively enter into the natural or material world via anthropomorphic similes... Many works have an aphoristic quality that recall Zen koans, and they can be playfully amusing or even silly... A strong set of sympathetic but never sentimental observations.
-Kirkus Reviews
The tone is established from the outset: wry, wise, sardonic and playful, drawing the reader irresistibly in. Solonche is revealed as a philosopher in the mold of Wittgenstein: aphoristic, charismatic, acerbic and oddly mystical. If you met this book in a bar, you would definitely want to take it home with you and every day thereafter congratulate yourself on how lucky you've been. But that is true of all his books.
-David Mark Williams
These short poems are an extraordinary amalgam of wit, close observation, humor, and clear seeing. Each one singles out and illuminates an ordinary moment - ordinary, that is, until the poet explodes into a miniature epiphany. Easy of access and frequently profound, J.R. Solonche's poems induce in me a state of delighted surprise.
-Chase Twichell, author of Horses Where the Answers Should Have Been: New and Selected Poems
Also from
Solonche, J. R.
Also in
General Poetry
Dante's Vita Nuova, New Edition: A Translation and an Essay
Alighieri, Dante
Pitavy, Francois
Paperback
Sounding the Seasons Enlarged Edition: One Hundred and Ten Sonnets for the Christian Year
Guite, Malcolm
Paperback
They Bloom Because of You: Poems on the Infinite Love, Growth, and Magic of Motherhood
Urlichs, Jessica
Paperback
Lao Tzu: Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way
Le Guin, Ursula K.
Lao Tzu
Paperback