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In his second collection, Christopher Kondrich navigates the link between what we see as our inner value and the external world that supplies it. Valuing's deeply personal poems explore faith, love, ethics, and mortality from a variety of angles and through a variety of poetic forms as a means of questioning the origination of one's own value system. Does it come from the belief in a god, from the love one gives or receives, or from the diminution of the self and its desires? If "you cannot sneak through your life," as the speaker of one of Valuing's poems proclaims, then how might one ensure that the noise a life inevitably makes is an echo of the values one holds dear?
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Reviews
"It is one thing to know there are limits to human knowledge, boundaries to how much we can accurately say about our labyrinthine selves, the objects we touch, and, more vastly, the mystery in which we spin. It is another thing entirely for a poet to articulate this so keenly that suddenly our limits become our bounty. What is of value in us? 'To live amongst walls and proclaim those walls a home,
Katie Ford, author of If You Have to Go
"In Valuing Christopher Kondrich fashions startling, arresting images and fabulous metaphors that are all the more startling, arresting, and fabulous because they're so functional to the overflowing reality and profundity of his poems. He has an excellent mind accompanied by an exuberant imagination."
Vijay Seshadri, author of 3 Sections
"'I choose to love / as asylum from that which presses me / to hate,' says the opening poem of Valuing, a rich and vital book by Christopher Kondrich. Lines like these are quite apropos in such a philosophical work of art in which Kondrich questions and embraces both God and pessimism, all the while trying to establish a self-a being worth more than what late capitalism can allow-by chanting what
Jericho Brown, author of The New Testament