Cleaning a Rainbow

Poetry. In this engaging collection, Gildner considers life as seen anew through the eyes of his young daughter, and yet he remembers his own father and reflects on the passage of time in his life. "Here he comes again with a new book of poems," writes Paul Zimmer. "Gildner, the kid from Flint, the jaunty pitcher/shortstop, the quarterback from Holy Redeemer, a genuine American article, still in love with the 1950s and being young, still showing us the fancy moves and surprising turns." Dave Smith writes that Gildner "reminds me of Randall Jarrell's praise for a language that even cats and dogs can read, the hardest thing in the world to write well."

Gary Gildner is the author of twenty books, including poetry, fiction, and memoir. His previous poetry collection, The Bunker in the Parsley Fields, won the Iowa Poetry Prize. His other awards include the William Carlos Williams, Theodore Roethke, and Pushcart prizes and the National Magazine Award for fiction. He has held fellowships from the NEA, Breadloaf, MacDowell, Yaddo, and Fulbright lectureships to Poland and Czechoslovakia. He lives in Idaho's Clearwater Mountains.