Dark Side of North

Book excerpt: Stunning, lyrical, elegiac, and spiritual, Dark Side of North is Anthony S. Abbott's magnum opus. Its pages are filled with heartache and humor, wonder and wisdom, faith and fierceness, love and loss, grit and grace. Dark Side of North breaks your heart and then stitches it back together again-seamlessly. The poems provide a rare peephole into the heart-space of a man who traverses the terrain of the third stage of life, and now courageously stands on the threshold of death's cabin in the woods. As such the collection speaks hope directly into our particular pandemic cultural moment of loss, lament, and self-introspection. Thanks to Abbott's brilliance, readers of this book will rediscover how to "receive each morning as a wrapped gift," and find themselves pointed once again toward their true north. - Dr. Jacqueline Bussie