Stratum of Choice

This collection includes some of my earliest poems, and many of my first experiments with language and form, which would go on to shape the poetics of my larger, more systematic works On the Back of a Tiger and The Deep.

This chapbook is very much a part of my juvenilia, but along with all the other work that I have made available from the years of my formation, I hope there is something of value to be gleaned here, or at least the contour of a trajectory to be followed and interpreted.

There is a youthful passion verging on catastrophe in these pages. When I read these poems after all this time, I am thrown right back into the wash of intense feeling that characterized my youth, the pain and terror of being alive, the world before me, full of chaos and heartache and wonder and love.

Caught up in the swell, adrift in the infinite, I try to get my head above water long enough to survey the horizon, to plot a course for some different shore.  Perhaps I will encounter other swimmers here, drawn along by the tide of recurrence and return.

Get a print copy at Gumroad.

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© by Eric Stein. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.

Cover image: “Étretat, Coucher de Soleil” by Claude Monet. This work is in the public domain, and can be viewed at Wikimedia Commons. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0.

The digital editions of this book are preserved and open access in the LAC Aurora catalogue and at the Internet Archive by permission of the author.