Perseus Academic: The Volunteer by Candace Black

Set against a Midwestern backdrop of seasonal turnings and yearly migrations, the poems of Candace Black’s The Volunteer sink their roots deep into the rich soil of dailiness, into what William Carlos Williams called the ground sense necessary. These are quiet, confident poems filled with a wise and steady intimacy, and they possess that remarkable and rare gift to say always, and only, what is true.—Robert Hedin

Candace Black’s poems, like the volunteer of her title, are pure gift. They spring, as if spontaneously, from the common clay of everyday experience—love, marriage, family, birth and death. In fresh, precise, evocative language, these poems prove the examined life worth living.—Madeline DeFrees

Softly lyrical and vividly imagined, always beautiful in their telling, Candace Black’s poems present us with a vision full of wonder, of celebration, and, perhaps most poignantly, of vulnerability. The Volunteer is a book about need, both fulfilled and unfulfilled. Whether writing about the interior life of family or the natural world outside her window, the strange and lonely wilderness of insomnia or the violent intrusion of animal predation, unwanted knowledge or unimaginable grief, Black never flinches from her role as witness to the ongoing narrative of human love and loss that connects us.—Kim Barnes, author of In the Wilderness: Coming of Age in Unknown Country

Candace Black grew up on U.S. Marine Corps bases in southern California, and received an MFA from the University of Montana. Her work has been published in many journals and has won a 1988 Loft Award and a 1998 SASE Jerome Foundation Fellowship. She lives in Mankato, Minnesota, with her husband, poet Richard Robbins, and their two sons.