A Path Between Houses (Brittingham Prize in Poetry)

These are tough-minded poems about loss, and what comes afterwards-the difficult work of rebuilding a life. Greg Rappleye gathers his material across a vast American landscape, from the Florida Keys through the Nevada Desert to the California Coast, rocketing around the country with some strange friends-Odysseus, William Faulkner, Frank Sinatra, and private eye Jim Rockford. Rappleye is not afraid to implicate the self, building a heroic persona in the classic sense-a person in whom the flaws are as celebrated as the occasional triumph.

"The geography of Greg Rappleye's A Path Between Houses covers great swatches of American territory-Michigan, the desert outside Vegas, Key West and the Gulf, and the territories of mania and sanity, drinking or not drinking, and fishing, memory and desire. Two of his alter egos are Frank Sinatra and Odysseus, and Rappleye is a champion epic storyteller. The tension of his lines pulls the reader forward, the detail is thick and fast, and you never know where the poems are going."-Alicia Ostriker

"When it comes to the news from the heart, the heart in Greg Rappleye's poems has been around. And the news assures us that when the world dishes it out, we can take it, can even redeem it. This is a book that deserves the prize it's been awarded-and certainly deserves readers who love their poems carved with care out of the hard stuff."-Jack Ridl

"In these fine poems, Greg Rappleye celebrates as much as anything the art of talk, with all the humor, outrage, tenderness, regret, and sheer amazement of a soul at work in the daily world. You couldn't ask for a more engaging poet, or for one with a steadier, stronger sense of attentiveness that may be art's best hope."-Brooks Haxton

"These poems make me think of a length of copper wire, with one end tapped into ancient history and the other end soldered to the now. When Rappleye lets the juice flow between these two points, the two become one, and we readers get zapped."-Lucia Perillo