David Salner--
Poet, essayist, fiction writer
FINAL
SALE
The Green Vault Heist
“The Green Vault Heist is not only a beautiful book, it is great company.”
—John Skoyles, Poetry Editor, Ploughshares
by David Salner
new poems -- awed by the sweep of human culture, deeply concerned by the unfolding shambles, honoring the depth of human resilience.
$20 from author
cover: Warren Simons
about SUMMER WORDS
“David Salner is the Poet Laureate of working people. He speaks with authority because he has been there—steel mills, iron ore mines, machine shops, and garment factories. All his poems display the craft of a fine poet and the heart of a fine human being. His necessary work is essential reading. To have his best work gathered in one volume is a gift to be treasured.” —William Heath, author of Steel Valley Elegy
“David Salner is a storyteller at heart whose poems are redolent with the power of understatement and close observation….the taste and smell of truth.”—Greg McBride, Innisfree Poetry
new from Broadstone Books in 2019
The Stillness of Certain Valleys
Selections from reviews
“David Salner‘s The Stillness of Certain Valleys is impressively sustained. I could quote memorable lines from every poem. Beer for Breakfast is a pitch-perfect opening poem, and the subsequent sequence A Dream of Quitting Time is very strong. Then comes the agonizing Goodbye to My Big Toe. Salner writes with gritty authority about many kinds of work…. I admire the moving way he evokes the dignity of a working man in Horse Trailer with Beans: ‘nothing / but the dirt under his nails / and who he is.’… It's that impressive eye for telling detail that make the whole collection a compelling and convincing read. Salner has been there, done that. As Whitman once said, ‘I am the man. I was there.’ ”
—William Heath, New Pages
“Compelling, political, and socially aware”
—William Caraher, North Dakota Quarterly
“Salner's lyrical poems give us the physical world, its roughness and beauty, and the life it sustains—the miner, the immigrant grandmother, The Stillness of Certain Valleys—and they bring us closer to ourselves and who we were in the rapidly fading 20th century. ”
--Greg McBride, Editor, Innisfree Poetry Journal
In Salner’s images, you find a dependable homing resonance…. Salner invites you to glance at the sky through the confines of a hospital stay just to show you that, though caught in a time warp, and though simultaneously flattened and flattered by the spangle of morphine, something not a little miraculous can still dance on your horizon.
--Toba Singer, Culture Vulture
“David Salner's poems are full of fresh and evocative images....[He] invites his readers in with his exact language and surprising metaphor. The music of these poems is often subtly beautiful…. Salner's work bears reading over and over.”
--Anne Colwell, Poetry Editor of the Delmarva Review
25 Poems
A special retrospective on my poetry featuring 25 poems from previous books just appeared in the latest Innisfree Poetry Journal--
Blue Morning Light
“ … clear-eyed, luminous poems. Longing permeates this book, the language thrumming with desire…. these poems ache their way toward revelation with a startling clarity and brilliance.”
—Elizabeth Knapp, author The Spite House
“Whether elegizing his grandfather’s skill with a scythe or reinterpreting the images of realist painter George Bellows or capturing the rhythm of the American worker … David Salner is a writer with vision, with an ear for beautiful sound.”
—Denton Loving, author of Crimes Against Birds, editor
"David Salner is a storyteller at heart whose poems are redolent with the power of understatement and close observation.... Salner's lines have the taste and smell of truth." --Innisfree Poetry Journal
"Depicts the lives of working men and women with empathy but without sentimentality.... Salner's work honors the material realities of the demanding 'here' in which so many people live and work."--Now & Then, Appalachian heritage magazine
