Dear Gravity

“Gregory Djanikian has always been a poet of amazed appreciation, a man bedazzled by life’s bounty while acutely sensitive to its dangers, acutely aware of how love and humor help us endure life’s beguiling deluge, its ‘beautiful wreckage deepening.’ In Dear Gravity all this comes across with the sweet generosity that makes Djanikian such an amiable and companionable poet.” — Mark Halliday

“If you read Gregory Djanikian’s wondrous new collection—and you should—make sure you play close attention to the opening poem, ‘Violence’…[Its] imaginative range…deserves notice. Lest you think it is just a setup for another sequence of lamentations regarding life in the most technologically advanced civilization ever, rest assured that it is not the case. Rather, it is an overture that leads to genuine displacement—exile from Alexandria, Egypt’s legendary city, first to Beirut, thence to America—and from there to the adventures of high school and a new dialect….Dear Gravity is, in fact, a celebration of life in all its inconsistency and contradiction, its puzzling admixture of chaos and bliss.” — Frank Wilson, The Philadelphia Inquirer

“Each of the book’s five sections comprises a thematic unit that picks up threads previously introduced, thus weaving an elegant and coherent whole….Djanikian reflects on social issues, relationships, family history, domestic life, and our connection to nature, always conscious of our place in the larger world….Perhaps because [he] realizes that ‘so much of the world/exists without us’ (‘So Much of the World’), he is at ease with the unsolved puzzles and mysteries of existence. [His] craft is so consummate it’s easy to overlook. Yet this very craft, from the careful organization of the book that gives the poems resonance to the line breaks that push the narrative poems forward but slow the lyrics so each line and image reverberates, makes these complex poems seem effortless. Poets will study this book to learn how Djanikian works such magic. All of us will read Dear Gravity to experience the way it renders our lives both familiar and strange.” — Kathleen Aguero, Solstice Magazine