Poverty Creek Journal

Book excerpt: “The achievement of ‘Poverty Creek Journal’ is precisely that it does retrace that kind of wandering—and, in so doing, makes something lovely and meaningful of a difficult year. Gardner does not go in for pat analogies; he does not claim, as Camus once did about soccer, that running taught him everything about death. Nor does he go in for pat consolation. His journal does not so much end as stop, as if he has simply not yet risen for the next morning’s run.” — Kathryn Schulz, New Yorker “This is one of the most beautifully rendered pieces about running I’ve encountered under fifty pages. On the surface, Poverty Creek Journal is a daily running log in lyric prose, but it soon offers a meditation on the articulable nature of the human experience. After the narrator suddenly loses his brother, we follow his thoughts through nature, his mind wandering to integrate the strength and frailty of the body as he runs. Gardner’s luminous insights on running are often breathtaking. He likens running to ‘half sleep, when you’re awake in a way, but aware of dreams passing in a kind of un-retraceable wandering….the turning colors passing through me… no real way to put any of this into numbers, mile after mile streaming through me.’ We escape with Gardner away, from the finitude of miles and the illusion of stasis through his will to observe and gradually integrate loss into his body.” — Jaclyn Gilbert, LitHub “[E]ach year I turned my attention again to Poverty Creek Journal, listening closely to Gardner’s prose to understand better what I was striving for in my own work. Only recently did I start to realize that what he’d achieved in his writing didn’t mean I was an inadequate writer, but rather that I’d found a partner of sorts, someone whose work I could converse with through my own work.” —Joe Demes, Meter Magazine Thomas Gardner lives and teaches in Blacksburg, Virginia, on the edge of the Jefferson National Forest.