Feller

About the Book…

Using the natural world as both mirror and lens, the poems in Denton Loving’s third full-length collection of poetry explore themes of connection, longing, and the pursuit of a fully lived life. They celebrate “the light that enters the woods and cleanses the wound.” They seek the sacred order in everything, from the phases of the moon down to the delicate colors of a moth’s wings. And yet, they are not cloistered away from the human struggle–whether with nature, with each other, or with the self. Feller envisions our environment and landscape, not as mere backdrop or ornament but as revelatory forces illuminating the hidden chambers of the self. At once deeply rooted in his Appalachian soil and universally resonant, Feller confirms Loving’s position among those rare poets who transmute a sense of place into profound human truth.

With a naturalist’s sense of ecology and concision, Loving weaves out of this world both allegory and immediacy, a place where you can be both hurt and healed, and where you must unbramble all the truths of living through this earth. Loving’s precision of line and sentence, of image and sound, render poems where “Each bud swells and splits / and unfurls into leaves //and fruit. A tender explosion!” At once timely and timeless, Feller is a superbly striking and essential book.
— Matt W. Miller, author of Tender the River

Denton Loving makes lyric sense of complex issues in poem after poem in Feller, with his special blend of eco-poetics and earthly reason. Read this book for its verbal delights, even in heartbreak, where the speaker notes how “even a tree has desire,” and is able to “praise the quake of the earth accepting its weight.”
— Elaine Sexton, author of Site Specific: New & Selected

These poems shimmer and shapeshift like the dual meaning inherent in the collection’s title. So too do the speakers in these poems, who are both vulnerable humans and conduits through which lyrical ecstasy passes. These are love poems, loss poems, poems that “open doors to new worlds.” They refuse an easy sentimentality. Feller is defined by its abundance, by the “bright tapestry” of its intricately crafted sonic pleasures. Underlying the human “language of grief” and Loving’s attentive reverence for the natural world is this music, which is always “a newly alive thing.” Reading Feller is a transformative, joyful, loneliness-alleviating experience.
— Annie Woodford, author of Where You Come From Is Gone: Poems

Praise for Feller…

“Each poem in Feller is an expression of such a transformation and the space that nuance occupies in nature, love, and spirituality, and his poems act ‘like light through a lens … refracting and separating the sun’s beams—to help us understand our complicated past and present, to guide us through the mysteries of the future.’” – Booklife Review, Publisher’s Weekly

“…a collection of poetry that beautifully observes the life of the natural world. Often, it feels like an ode sung to Appalachia.” – Bradley Sides, Electric Literature

“Loving’s poems dwell in surreal interstitial spaces. By slipping the bounds of everyday routine or the blinders of a human-centered perspective, Feller invites us to glimpse an ephemeral threshold. From here, renewal is possible. Maybe even transcendence.” – Emily Choate, Chapter 16

“A collection like this is one that teaches us by example what it is to be human, to experience the world through our relationships, and learn from both what nourishes us and what takes from us.” – David B. Prather, As the Crow Flies / Appalachian Journal

“Feller features fully culminating poems whose ends do justice to their beginnings. Formal and free verse works stand in equal strength here, and the old meets the new in exciting ways.” – John Davis, Jr., Kestrel

“We may even consider the octopus and its multitude of hearts as a symbol, a vehicle for the poems that pulse throughout Feller. The poems are like sensitive tentacles, adapting and creating strength through vulnerability—wisdom and grace are cultivated throughout, and Loving’s existential introspections emanate the light of this collection’s character.” – Jake Lawson, MicroLit

“…you realize gradually– the turtle, Rilke’s death, the poet’s own awareness of death as he sits next to an airplane’s emergency exit door– circles out from and back to that unfinished experience of the sister who died. And this is perhaps the most profound insight: that we don’t always do things in the order we expect, that there are mysteries around us and in us.” – Meredith Sue Willis, Books for Readers

“Noticing is the key. Loving uses attention like a tool, a flashlight to dispel misapprehension instead of darkness. He pays attention to ritual, human institutions, and desires in context which become, like his plant and animal subjects, fleeting, small scale, ephemeral.” – Noah Soltau, Red Branch Review

“…Denton displays the naturalist’s eye and ear and sensibility; every poem is rich with place and presence. But Feller is even deeper and richer than nature. The natural landscape is simply gesso for the canvas – these poems are about the burden of heart. These are love poems, and loss poems. While the naturalist observes, questions, connects, we are permitted to observe and connect with his deepest feelings and honest vulnerability. – Bill Griffin, Verse and Image

“Like fresh corn from a home garden, simmered in butter and milk and piled on a hot biscuit, we sit down to Feller on the day of harvest, not having to till and sow and weed but just enjoy.” – Steven Hundley, Deep South Magazine

“In Feller, Loving continues to pan gold from the streams of his thematic material, including but not limited to landscape, little histories, local symbolism, and the life of the heart.” – Carson Colenbaugh, Southern Review of Books

Order Feller directly from Mercer University Press or from online retailers Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Bookshop.org. Feller is also available at great independent bookstores such as Atlas Books, City Lights, The Country Bookshop, Landmark Booksellers, Malaprop’s, Novel Memphis, Plenty Downtown Bookshop, and Read Spotted Newt. Please don’t forget to rate and review Feller or add it to your “Want to Read” shelf on Goodreads.