To Leave for Our Own Country

Though what we commonly consider sacred in religious terms is referenced in this moving and love-filled collection, that tradition is eclipsed by a higher, wider, and more ethereal reach. The poems here provide a record of the poet’s always sudden and brief yet bright encounters with that unknown mystical realm—the texture of water as it falls against the shore, the sound of a snapped tree branch, the recollection of a childhood walk to school and the influence of weather on the meaning of such a walk. All common enough, one may say, but the richness of observed detail in these crisp poems is coupled with formal skill, wisely measured ambiguity, some wry off-hand humor, and plenty of wit. For my reading, that adds up to a fine, uncommonly absorbing book, one that tilts the somber toward affection and the grave toward delight.
—Maurice Manning

Wise, clear-eyed, and exquisitely musical, John Linstrom’s assured debut creates its own weather. Reading To Leave for Our Own Country, I felt the snow and rain, the welcome sun at the storm’s end, the long dark and the long day, the endings that lead—always—to new beginnings, the pure, bright, melodic holiness of the moment and what it might teach us.
—Joe Wilkins

John Linstrom’s elegantly written book of poetry opens our hearts and minds to a cosmic world of spiritual resonance. In this spectacular debut volume, Linstrom moves through geographies and the full liturgical calendar, the full circle of human experience—from love, marriage and parenthood, to loss of elders. He writes of the loss of our environment through climate change and the ways that we can create awareness of our dilemma. Then, through his visionary final poem, he directs us, with his mastery of metaphor, to leave for our own country by another road.
—Mary Swander

The natural world unfolds in ongoing changes of light and violent storms and moments of sheer sunrise and moonlit beauty as patient humans sustain their lives in John Linstrom’s lovely collection, To Leave for Our Own Country. These poems are about surviving and sheltering in each other, but they are also about stopping to notice, to remember, to honor, and to mourn the troubling signs of a changing climate. Homesickness and loss mark many of these poems, as the “retting” of the organic world—that force of nature that separates the fiber from the stem—becomes metaphor for all that which breaks down and dies away. But love is the abiding force, the glue in the world these poems occupy. “We love this world so; we pour into it,” the poems announce. And the love comes in incessant waves, love enough to survive snowstorms and near-drownings and hurricane force winds, love that flows into the poems just as tributaries, wetlands, and river mouths feed the author’s home waters of Lake Michigan. 
—Debra Marquart