Cloud Builder

Reviews / Votes

The only thing I wanted to do after reading Cloud Builder was read it again. Morrow gives a master class in how to write a spare, lively lyricism that will speak to readers about fathers, sons, history, place, and how we go on living despite our losses. Elegiac, poignant, tender, and always surprising. This is the real deal: poems that feel and that make you look at your own life and family anew. -- Janice N. Harrington * award-winning author of Yard Show and Even the Hollow My Body Made Is Gone * Morrow's disquieting debut unsettles the myth of artmaking in which artists often hide: that through creation, the artist-and the viewer too perhaps-experiences catharsis. From the specter of an uncle with whom Morrow shares his name, to the unfortunate deaths of both his grandmother and grandfather due to cancer, tormented by the many mistakes a young man makes in life, and in love, these poems are pentimentos: repentant, interrogative, 'each of [them] dancing, up to, and beyond, the edge of ruin.' What Morrow achieves in this collection, ultimately, belies redemption and facile absolution. Instead, Cloud Builder offers us a practice to the otherwise, ever-reflective, always-reflexive struggle toward reconciliation. -- Angel Garcia * author of Teeth Never Sleep and Indifferent Cities *