The Uncertainty Principle

The Uncertainty Principle

“Once a student told me her father said that when older people cry, they’re weeping because the world is beautiful – they already know it’s sad. Mark Kraushaar’s poems, too, look beyond the sorrow and find instead a world that’s almost unbearably lovely. I fell hard for Falling Brick Kills Local Man, Kraushaar’s first book; I have an even bigger crush on this one.” – David Kirby

“A bell goes tolling over the landscape of Mark Kraushaar’s The Uncertainty Principle and its burden is Moment, moment … The word keeps recurring in this engrossing collection. Kraushaar sometimes seems temperamentally as much short story writer as poet (something to be regretted only by those who would keep poetry pure of life’s muddy complexities), and many of his poems offer rich, beguiling, abbreviated narratives. The book abounds in character revelations perhaps too modest to be called epiphanies – but moments, even so, whose unlikely glimmerings are welcome and illuminating.” – Brad Leithauser

“Mark Kraushaar’s The Uncertainty Principle is the best counterargument to the specious claim that narrative poetry is either old fashioned, ‘linear’ or predictably ‘conventional’. These poems have all the excitement and complexity of life as we live it now, together with a depth of speculation that is positively stunning in the light it casts on the intimate nooks and crannies of social experience that all of us encounter but either fail to notice or find words for. The sensation of time is Kraushaar’s ultimate subject, but he approaches time so imaginatively, so freshly, through such a detailed range of voices and occasions, in poems that unfold in such surprising yet inevitable ways that one feels as if every other possible subject for a poem – love, death, the struggles of dailiness, the fear of loss, friendship and work, childhood, contingency, and lack of faith – has been woven into the netting of this one obsession. This is a book to be enjoyed and savored, to be read with pleasure and gratitude, to be learned by heart.” – Alan Shapiro

Reviews of The Uncertainty Principle

The Hopkins Review, Spring 2013
"A Kraushaar poem always works from the inside out and, in illuminating the most fundamental human experiences, becomes a meditation of hope on which the mind subsists after the words end. Like the artist in his poem "Non, je ne regret rien: Edith Piaf in Concert," he sings and sings again, for all he’s worth:

But you, sir, and you, mister,
think how the heart, atop its substrata
of explication and excuse, wants one more chance,
and you ticking softly away in the sad room
over the feed grain store, and you, and you,
the lady now standing,
the one just starting to clap, and you, mister,
and you, the one now bringing one hand
to your mouth – think of it, say it, sing it,
sing it again.

– Rosannah Oh

Antioch Review, Summer 2012
"If you’re paying any attention at all to the people you dodge on the street, sit next to in the left-turn lane until the light changes, hear swearing quietly somewhere or anywhere, then you’re ready to listen to what Mark Kraushaar has to offer, poems that aren’t excuses, aren’t explanations, just the sharply rendered facts of the matter. And on a rainy day at the gym, five guys who know way too much of the truth about each other and so about themselves see what there is to see in the ‘rattling’ plate glass: ‘rain on the awnings, rain over the windows, / rain over the gutters and rain / in soft, sparkling ropes along the curbs . . .’ (‘Third Street Muscle and Fitness’). And Henry, all the evasions of his abandoned marriage confessed, pretty much sums it up: ‘The Sox are strong this year, / we’re going places, I can feel it’ (‘There sat down, once, a thing on Henry’s heart so heavy’)."

Rain Taxi, Spring 2012
“Kraushaar’s narrative poetry has a fresh voice that is funny, challenging and profound. The secret to being happy, he says, is not to get twisted up by all that has been or what might happen, but to pay attention to the ‘gorgeous, and impenetrable present.’" – Mark Liebenow

Hayden’s Ferry Review, 14 November 2011
“Sweet Holy [ ______ ] (your choice of divine – but completely politically correct – descriptor here), Kraushaar’s poems rock. I’m going to drop some of the standard poetic analysis here, not because Kraushaar’s work doesn’t live up to it – it certainly does – but because it is so organic, has such spontaneity, such a gut-punch of recognition, that I feel freed to do so. While I’m in the grip of this strong sense of permission, I’m going to use it to use a few words that some poets might consider anathema when applied to their work: effortless, narrative, characterization, and fun." – Debrah Lechner

To read the whole of this review, please click on link: Full Review of The Uncertainty Principle