Petroglyphs / Craig Foltz

Praise

In the poems of Petroglyphs, Craig Foltz is like a burlesque artist who begins the act wearing dozens of layers and strips down until he is covered by only the most strategically-placed phrases. The book’s three sections—by turns expansive, lapidary, and fragmentary—show how a great deal of what we ‘know’ can be summoned up by mere suggestion, and that attempts at explanations don’t necessarily make things clearer. By the end you’ll feel naive for having believed in stable concepts in a world where there are curious semantic slippages, where “practical experience is no substitute for practical experience.
—Erik Kennedy

This is poetry that makes me want to write poetry. Causation and correlation tease apart like pulled jackfruit; a phrase could be a ladder ora riptide. Dextrous, inquisitive and rich—swap where are we going? for how are we having this much fun?
—Ya-Wen Ho

This is a sparkling work, transporting the reader through layers of biology, paleontology and deep time. The only constant is an overarching imagination, transforming itself, sentence by sentence, into something wonderful and strange.
—Richard von Sturmer

1. Affixes of lithic matter escape morphology. 2. Meaning buckles under the pressure of cellular mysticism. 3. Taxonomy spreads limbic. 4. Under a microscope, a diatom may appear as a smooth pebble or an aperture of light. 5. Poets are advised to bring a headtorch, waterproof footwear and to mind the stalactites.
—Toyah Webb