Canary in the Dark

Canary in the Dark is a glance backward into a past of pain and raucous joy too, with that leveling certainty of both distance and knowing. This exuberant new collection of memoir poems offers few definitive answers or epiphanies. In its measured lyrical wake, the reader finds that at the end this awful darkness we seek to escape really holds little fear.

This ever familiar coal-mining town and its people of once memory, that defining part of a life....and longing.

"Bruce Colbert's poems anatomize a lifelong quest to resolve the irresolvable: The legacy of an emotionally abusive parent. The voice is vernacular, garrulous, and steady, and the landscape of the Appalachian coal belt becomes the treacherous terrain of memory in which the speaker is the bellwether of the title."
- Amy Glynn, author of A Modern Herbal

"Canary in the Dark captures a landscape of a time and place, of family and faith. A landscape of loss and unwanted change. These poems bring colour to their oblivion and tell truths."
- Christopher Hopkins, author of The Last Time We Saw Strangers

"A staggering memoir written in reflective prose... that out of the purest joy sometimes comes an awful pain. Stories from a coal mining town boyhood to love to war."
- Jeffery Paul Horn, author of Manic