Wilcox, Finn: Too Late to Turn Back Now: Prose & Poems

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Too Late to Turn Back Now: Prose & Poemsby Finn Wilcox(Empty Bowl, paperback)

Publication Date: January 15, 2018

Publisher Marketing:Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. At long last his collected works are available in a handsome volume from Empty Bowl. TOO LATE TO TURN BACK NOW gathers all of Wilcox’s hard-to-find, out-of-print and limited-edition books and adds a generous selection of new poems and prose pieces. Included is Wilcox’s widely praised first book,Here Among the Sacrificed, a collection of poems, stories and short prose coming from the poet’s experiences riding freight trains. It rings with the clang and gritty dust of America’s freight yards, and takes a compassionate look at the hobos who ride, heirs of a Depression-era community who, in a metaphoric and very real sense, were “dropped off on a side-track.” In “The Boneyards” the poet, camped by an abandoned warehouse outside Mason City, Iowa, echoes Kenneth Rexroth and offers a playful nod to West Coast nature poems. Love, travel, friendship, adventure, misadventure and loss. Wilcox strikes universal chords in a fresh and accessible way. His poems and stories come comfortably dressed for any season, neatly packed and ready for the journey. Finn Wilcox distills for readers of off-the-road literature the sweet wine and tangy whiskey of his earlier books, and adds a healthy supply of new Wilcox work. This collection demands to be read to your beloveds, to your children and parents. An elegant tour de force by a devoted artist, here’s a book shaped by the precision and compassion for which Finn is loved among workers of the word, and of the woods and sea.

“This is a book like no other. From hobo jungles alongside the railroad yards of the American West to the cave of a hermit nun on a mountain in China, from the hard-scrabble life of Pacific Northwest tree-planters to the tenderest of love lyrics, these poems and prose anecdotes sparkle like little gems. Masterful in their rendition of vernacular speech, with a touch of Han Shan, they are always engaging, often amusing. Quirky. Luminous. Authentic. Finn Wilcox is a man of great heart, and this book is witness to it.”Clem Starck

“O lucky me! O lucky you! O lucky world! this new book by Finn Wilcox includes all of his railroad masterpieceHere Among the Sacrificed. And when Finn wasn’t on the rails with friends and making friends, he was tramping in China with other friends and making friends, and poems, and putting together stories, that he sometimes, I bet, told to fellow treeplanters of the Pacific Northwest as they hunched over a mountainside setting in a new forest. Finally, Finn would go home, and when he was home, Finn wrote love poems.”Bob Arnold