Without My Asking

In poems that range from New England to the Southwest, Without My Asking takes its cue from Psalm 90’s petition— “teach us to number our days.” That biblical sense of limits—of what we can know and not know—and, ultimately, the mystery of before and after that encloses our existence is the center around which these poems turn, both seasonally and from day-to-day. In poems that attend to the events of our lives—from the deaths of parents to hummingbirds at a bird feeder—these poems work to utter “Yes” to all that happens, that “peculiar affirmative” that recognizes, as Elizabeth Bishop says, “Life’s like that . . . also death.”

Robert Cording taught for 38 years at Holy Cross College in Worcester, Massachusetts, and is now a poetry mentor in MFA program at Seattle Pacific University. He has received two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships in poetry and his poems have appeared in publications such as the Nation, Georgia Review, Southern Review, Poetry, Hudson Review, Kenyon Review, New Ohio Review, New England Review, Orion, and the New Yorker. He has released five books with CavanKerry Press: Against Consolation (2002), Common Life (2006), Walking With Ruskin (2010), Only So Far (2015), and Without My Asking (2019).

Robert Cording
Pub date – October 1, 2019
Trade paper – 6 X 9″
$16
ISBN 978-1-933880-74-7
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