Winner of the 2025 Blue Light Book Award

Praise for Everything: New and Selected Poems

Terry Lucas is the author of two prize-winning chapbooks, If They Have Ears to Hear (Southeast Missouri State University Press, 2012) and Altar Call (San Gabriel Valley Literary Festival, 2013), in addition to three previous full-length collections: In This Room (CW Books, 2016), Dharma Rain (Saint Julian Press, 2016), and with photographer Gary Topper, The Thing Itself (Longship Press, 2020).

His poetry has appeared in numerous national journals, including Alaska Quarterly Review, Best New Poets, and The Sun. Terry is Poet Laureate Emeritus of Marin County California and a freelance poetry coach at www.terrylucas.com.

In this moving and profoundly cohesive selection from his lifetime of poems, Terry Lucas tells us that "everything yes everything now gathered to us is leaving."Yet Lucas provides us with intense presence, whether he is writing about the boy he was - child of difficult parents, and so God-haunted that he became a boy preacher - or about the grown man who traverses, for work and for love, a keenly seen America. His work is enriched by his dialogue with other poets; many of these poems are afterpoems, some of them quite directly engaging with previous poetic texts. From his earliest poems to the new work that is this book's destination, Lucas' poetry is unified by a commitment to the urgencies of character, place, memory, language, and voice. Terry Lucas gives us a map of the road he's traveled, with "each switchback demanding full attention/in the moonless night."

- David Groff, author of Live in Suspense