Praise for Red Wing, stories by Rustin Larson
Praise for Rustin Larson’s Red Wing:
The stories are beautiful. I think you’ve made your mark as a writer of the Iowa landscape, particularly in winter, and small town life. These stories heavily affected by place are so memorable and poignant, plus often funny too.
–Suzanne Rhodenbaugh
I’m enjoying the stories. I especially have liked “Pearl Harbor,” “The Incomplete History of The Village Of Orilla,” “Lola, and “Road Trip.” I love the sense of place throughout the collection. Can really feel the landscape. The evoking with sensual images is also strong, as well as the use of dialogue.
–Michael Carrino
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/red-wing-rustin-larson/1139454159?ean=9781666286540
Review of Lost Letters and Windfalls by Nynke Passi
Review of Rustin Larson’s Lost Letters and Windfalls
The world of Rustin Larson’s Lost Letters and Windfalls is populated with the ordinary and the ecstatic. Among cornfields, junkyards, and a Dairy Queen an eclectic cast of characters marches across a rural stage: an old woman small “like a burlap bag / full of nylons,” angels, finches, family members, the wind, the muse, and a young girl in a Degas painting.
The poet asserts: “The light falls upon all things. I have/ my memory of you—quiet as a/ picture frame among all these broken houses.” In poem after poem, Larson distills to the essence, painting tableaux firmly cast in time yet strangely eternal. Even the elements and houses have temperaments: “A violent emptiness is / the wind, and it can pick up whole / houses, if it wants, piling them like / crumpled egg shells in an open field.” Or: “The old house is crumbling from sympathy.”
While things fall apart, they are also restored and put back together. Somewhere along the way, all things turn a bit holy: “But here’s what we are: each man, each woman, / each neuter object, a church.” There is an unmistakable imagist quiet at the heart of the universe: “We can choose / to stand outside ourselves if we wish, the snow falling.”
“Listen,” Larson urges, “the world / begins in a moment.” The moment is painterly, vivid. The poet trusts only his “sense of touch.” Each poem etches a picture onto our retinas. Nothing much happens while the movement of life is also momentous. A daughter’s birth is announced like a “little beacon / pulse on the sonogram” and a father-in-law’s death is marked by his children sitting “in the room” and speaking “softly to the afternoon.” Every moment turns nearly breathless.
The universe of Larson’s poems exudes a warmth where “planets are “fishing / for us, wanting / us.” “The moon is the friend of the earth / and the earth of the sun.” This is a book of small tendernesses and lightning bolts that you will remember for a long time.
Rustin Larson 