“In the autumn of last year, Bruce Guernsey enjoyed an attentive audience of several dozen, who lapped up a smolderingly dramatic poetry reading from his new retrospective book From Rain at the home of one-time Atlantic Monthly editor Ellery Sedgwick. Guernsey was introduced by Wendy Murray, who is both the mind behind the quarterly Ellery Sedgwick literary workshops at Beverly’s Long Hill, and the editor-in-chief (in fact the only editor) of Ecco Qua Press. It isn’t easy to make a poetry reading much more than an exercise in endurance for the audience, but Guernsey’s work was every bit as good as his delivery. He is a rare entity: A clean, rough, visionary poet in the classic American style, heavily anthologized and endorsed by Pulitzer Prize laureates, but so humble as to sometimes fly far from the eyes of the literary press, and so under-appreciated as to hit walls in every direction when he wanted to publish a retrospective. Put simply, he is exactly the kind of author Ecco Qua Press was created to find and publish. The right man and mechanism have met each other at exactly the right moment…”
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Third Cardinal 