Anchored by the first years of the Covid-19 pandemic, Kevin A. Risner's debut full-length poetry collection It's Easy to Lose Your Breath is both introspective and outward-facing, rippling from the poet's inner life into family and friendships, work and unemployment, suburban life, and wildlife. The collection draws on daydreams and nightmares, small animals' housecalls, and memories of childhood. Concerns about health and emotional well-being intermingle with the worries about what climate change will bring in a world hellbent on maintaining the capitalist status quo. Though not without that unbeatable Rust Belt hope, this is a collection that sits with the heavy weight of what the powers that be have done to the natural world and what it might take for ordinary people to survive in the years and decades to come.
"It’s Easy to Lose Your Breath reflects on our collective quarantine year with a burgeoning hope in the face of dread’s drumbeat. It’s no surprise that Kevin A. Risner’s poems snap with a pulse from The National because both yearn for what could be (or for what could’ve been) amid bedraggled reality. 'I’m the only human who weeps for this lone songbird,' Risner writes, but his poetry connects us. We all feel, and weep, with Risner through his poems. With our hearts on our sleeves, we struggle as one with '[t]he knowledge that I can try my best and I might still fail.' The year 2020 separated us, but It’s Easy to Lose Your Breath brings us together." – Mitchell Nobis, author of The Size of the Horizon, or, I Explained Everything to the Trees
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About the Poet:
Kevin A. Risner is the author of My Ear is a Sieve (Bottlecap Press, 2017), Do Us a Favor (Variant Literature, 2021), You Thought This Was Just Going To Be about Cleveland Didn’t You? (Ghost City Press, 2022), It’s Easy to Lose Your Breath (Match Factory Editions, 2026), and There’s No Future Where We Don’t Have Fire (Unsolicited Press, 2027). He is a product of Ohio and has lived there most of his life, except for brief stints in England and Turkey. You can find him hiking on the trails with his wife, lounging around with a book, or hoping amongst hopes that one of his sports teams from Cleveland might someday win another championship (to prove that 2016 was no mere fluke).