The Sky's Weight, Poems by Rane Arroyo

In The Sky’s Weight, Rane Arroyo’s new collection, the weight of the sky is as heavy as the universe, and as light as joy:

Let the cats interrogate far birds
to be forgotten after the sun returns to
 
its black hole throne.  Daylight keeps me
safe from forever.  No one has quoted
 
joy in years and yes it hurts
to be so jauntily human.  Look! 
 
A bluejay: blue, sky blue, like sky. 
Clouds are slow period marks
 
in a profound letter to Now. 
Why do we ever feel unloved?

Sample Poems by Rane Arroyo

Praise for Rane Arroyo’s Work

The Sky’s Weight
Molly Peacock: “Always fresh, always inventive, Arroyo calls from a magnificent inner awareness, reminding us in lines both playful and wise that our own flaws save us.”

The Buried Sea: New & Selected Poems
Connie May Fowler: “He is the love child of Edith Piaf and Albert Einstein.”

The Roswell Poems
Barbara Hamby: “The Roswell Poems is Americana at its most beautiful and bizarre.”

The Portable Famine, John Ciardi Prize winner
Robin Becker, contest judge: “Hybrid poetics all his own.”

How to Name a Hurricane
Maurice Kilwein Guevara: “By the end of this book, you’ll be naked enough to feel the green sparks of another body beside you in the darkened room.”

Rane Arroyo is a Puerto Rican/Latino who was born in Chicago, the city where he began his career as a performance artist in the art galleries of the 1980's. Falling in love with the writing aspects of his solo theater work, he began publishing poems and stories in small and major magazines and eventually found a wide readerships from many different groups. Beside being included in the newest Heath Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, Arroyo won the 2004-05 John Ciardi Poetry Prize for The Portable Famine; the 1997 Carl Sandburg Poetry Prize for his book The Singing Shark; a 1997 Pushcart Prize for the poem "Breathing Lessons" as published in Ploughshares. Other awards include: Stonewall Books Chapbook Prize; The Sonora Review Chapbook Prize, the Hart Crane Memorial Poetry Prize, and, recently, a 2007 Ohio Arts Council Excellence Award in Poetry.

ISBN 978-1934999738, 88 pages, $18.00

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