A Hard Fall and Good Bounce

Poetry, for me, has always been a way of gathering fragments—the daily objects, passing moods, and uneasy questions that won’t stay quiet. A poem begins with a small detail, then grows into something larger, a landscape where memory and imagination blur.

Take Darkening Skies and Black Coffee: what begins with rain, a taxi, and the skin of an apple soon spirals into a labyrinth of voices, suitcases, marriages, nightclubs, and the persistent hum of gloom. It is both diary and dreamscape, both tactile and elusive. That movement—between the ordinary and the unsteady, the grounded and the surreal—is at the heart of this collection.

These poems do not attempt to explain life so much as to live inside its contradictions. They circle around themes of restlessness, fracture, resilience, and the strange ways we try to mend ourselves with memory, with ritual, with words. My hope is that in reading, you’ll find your own reflections in these fragments: a recognition, however brief, that even the darkening skies can be accompanied by the bitter clarity of black coffee.

- Brian D’Ambrosio