Signals

"Signals calls us to consciousness in a natural world that is at once quietly witness to our loves and losses and yet always as urgently and insistently alive as we are. Ed Madden, as with any of our most necessary poets, locates us plainly in this conflicted Eden, this garden of the reverent imagination—greatest of creations and, perhaps, if we fail to mind and tend it, ultimately our undoing. He interprets with wonder and sobering wisdom even the slightest marks we leave behind."—Rafael Campo, author of The Enemy and The Healing Art: A Doctor's Black Bag of Poetry

"Signals combines a matter-of-fact lyrical eye with a view to harder social realities, and there is a consistency in the collection, a working with and around couplets and tercets, a sparseness that seems to match an arid landscape, a place where one searches for hope. This collection bears the evidence of a high level of craft alongside a concern for what goes on in our lives."—Afaa Weaver, author of The Plum Flower Dance: Poems, 1985–2005, from the foreword

2009 Finalist of the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance Award for Poetry