In The Smell of Campfire, KG Newman explores the intersection of fatherhood and sonhood in a quest to understand them both.
Balancing hope and uncertainty, and time and memory, Newman crafts a submission for past flaws with a fearless confidence in the present.
With the sublimity of fatherhood hanging around every poem like the smell of burnt wood, he takes the reader face-to-face with the pricelessness of being a parent, with moments of crisis, loss and crushing impermanence in contrast with the eternal resonance of patriarchal love.
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WHAT THEY’RE SAYING ABOUT THE BOOK
"In the beginning was the father, and soon, to his surprise, he became the son. Or was it the other way around? It’s hard to tell sometimes, and the poems in The Smell of Campfire inhabit this space between: the disorienting, liminal space of becoming. KG Newman’s poems are from a world full of ghosts, dreamscapes of jarring juxtapositions fueled by fear and loss, but there’s humor here, too, and baseball, and most importantly love. “Fatherhood,” Newman writes, is “a skein of vortices” we need our sons’ “help collecting.” The Smell of Campfire is a welcome addition to the literature of fatherhood."
— Ryan Vine, author of To Keep Him Hidden and other books
“Plenty of poets, from Theodore Roethke to Sylvia Plath, have imagined the Father as everything from a gentle Titan to a brute. In his latest collection, KG Newman takes a new turn, illuminating, with both simplicity and warmth, the everyday joys, wonders, and disappointments of fatherhood. He chronicles the missteps in his own upbringing, the grief that men experience after miscarriages, and his rearing of a son whom he hopes will embrace both his vulnerability and the paternal ancestors who didn’t know better."
— Mary Sutton, Poetry Editor, West Trade Review
"KG Newman captures the intimate joys and bottomless heartache of having a son — of being a son."
— Andrea Lawler, author of Let Me Take You Out Of This Town
KG Newman is a sportswriter who covers the Broncos, Rockies, college and high school sports for The Denver Post. The Arizona State alum’s first three collections of poems are also available on Amazon. More info and writing can be found at kgnewman.com. He lives in Hidden Village, Colorado, with his wife and three kids.