With stark honesty and gentleness, Cameron Morse shepherds us through this lyrical narrative of illness and fatherhood. Far Other is a book-length litany that both calls out to Saint Augustine and responds to his Confessions. It holds and grips us. We are immersed, as the poet is immersed, “outlining the glacially / slow loss" of his life. Morse has encased his memories, like his radiation mask, “in the glass box of the time / left" to him and asked that we not let go.

—Allison Blevins, Letters to Joan

Witness to both a personal and collective anticipatory mourning, Far Other collects a litany of imperative and interrogative statements often addressed to St. Augustine, and Morse shows how the bright bewilderment of our species’ dis-eases, of cancer and virus, casts “shadow loves” onto the lucid beauty of the ordinary. In these lyrical poems, Morse attends to how what’s bright or sacred in the foreground has always really depended upon its contrast with (or absence of) the profane, and he translates his experience of chronic illness into a series of images to transfix in our psyches. Unknowable death resides within every interior, and his words offer us oil paintings, “like a dove in the updraft, caught up / in the representation of a death / which is also your own.” The lyric in Morse’s steady hand becomes a shard of stained glass broken by life’s circumstances, by the long march of corporeal trauma, becomes a make-shift scalpel he uses to vivisect a tenderness beneath the body’s many seasons of the flesh, in which tumors, “glial white in gray / matter”, grow within, even while we hold “heartfelt debates about God / and the family garbage”.

—Marcus Myers, co-founding editor of Bear Review

Cameron Morse’s poems do not waste time. They speak with directness, with an urgency to hone our lives, to sharpen them on the stone of loving. In the Far Other, Morse is “making room…scooting over on the bench” for spirituality, for God, without sugar-coated prosody. The poems are original, fresh, as real as Christ in the cancer ward.

—Al Ortolani, Hansel and Gretel Get the Word on the Street

The poems in Cameron Morse’s Far Other achieve qualities far beyond the courage obviously required to write them at all. The poems exhibit literary endurance. When Morse offers a prayer “To the Patron Saint of Phlebotomy,” for example, he displays a talent for form and wit, essential to any art. A poem that acknowledges “the glial white in gray / matter” becomes an object of beauty; the appearance of St. Augustine alongside a two-year-old playing in the garage, pure affirmation. The images are unrelenting and tender; and Morse, himself, one of the finest poets of our time.

—Robert Stewart, Working Class: Poems.