Title: These Many Cold Winters of the Heart
Author: Ryan Quinn Flanagan
Book Publisher: Roadside Press
50 Little Angels
She died last week and the family convened
to box up all her things:
a few jewelry box keepsakes,
the new-fangled salad spinner from eight birthdays ago
that she could never work and refused to use,
that blazon of 50 little angels on the mantle,
hands clasped and eyes ascended in silent
porcelain deference; a small army thrown into boxes,
taped up and sent to storage, so the landlord
could list the place in the papers the following Tuesday,
champion an eat-in kitchen and proximity
to public transit.
(First appeared in Rusty Truck)
A Giant Bear Jumps Up the Rockface Outside Sudbury, Ontario
You never realize how helpless you would actually be
if the cards came calling.
A giant bear jumps up the rockface outside Sudbury, Ontario.
A single leap up over twenty feet after sprinting
in front of my truck.
Across three lanes of traffic.
Those powerful hind legs digging claws
deep into billions of years of solid Canadian Shield.
Power windows don’t seem so great after that.
We have a long way to go.
It was just a moment,
but it was everything to me.
Why anyone would count carbs after that
seemed completely farcical to me.
I was in control of nothing.
And all the power steering in the world
could not help me with that.
(First appeared in Setu)
Foreclosure Town
What the level of hand soap was at
when your brother died.
I would never forget that.
How many rings were failing the shower curtain.
How many tubes of toothpaste were left in the pantry,
were all the labels facing out?
That is the difference.
I remember everything.
How the air felt against the side of my nose
as the wind picked up.
Peeling railings on my fingers.
Those careless brown flecks with the orange underside.
How nothing seems to get everywhere.
(First appeared in Rusty Truck)
About the Book:
“Ryan Quinn Flanagan’s These Many Cold Winters of the Heart begins with an epigraph from Emily Dickinson “I am out with lanterns looking for myself,” a perfect depiction of this collection. You will be riveted from the opening poem, “I Grew Up in a Brewery Town,” where the Molson plant closes down but “people survived, they usually do” although “everyone had to pay for their beer now/and they were drinking more than ever” to the powerful “wonderful bloody magic” in “The Butterfly Hunter” near the end. Flanagan has no shortage of acute observations on everything from a humorous pair of crows and the homelessness of tents in winter, to Bob Dylan and Lawrence of Arabia. A plentiful array of humorous, everyday usually irreverent pieces, also stunning moments of awe, and sometimes addressing tough subjects without flinching, from unexpected violence and death, to family mental illness, the loss of a brother, and the suicide of a childhood friend and an uncle and its after-effects. These latter poems will sneak up on you and take your breath away….I highly recommend These Many Cold Winters of the Heart and look forward to having the book in hand. Susan Ward Mickelberry, author of And Blackberries Grew Wild.” (From Susan Ward Mickelberry Reviews).
“Ryan Quinn Flanagan walks us through daily life in These Many Cold Winters of the Heart. ‘This is no simple dirty ditty[.]’ The moments he captures come running off the page like a giant bear ‘A single leap up over twenty feet after sprinting/in front of my truck.’ He explores death, work, and all the minutiae of life somehow knowing how all the pieces fit together…” Karen Cline-Tardiff, Gnashing Teeth Publishing.
About the Author:
Ryan Quinn Flanagan is a Canadian-born author who lives in Elliot Lake, Ontario, Canada with his wife and many bears that rifle through his garbage. His work has been published both in print and online in such places as: The New York Quarterly, Rusty Truck, Borderless Journal, Evergreen Review, Red Fez, Horror Sleaze Trash and The Blue Collar Review. He enjoys listening to the blues and cruising down the TransCanada in his big blacked out truck.
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