River Church

A searing, lyrical journey spanning three and a half decades of raw, intimate, and unflinching poetry. River Church: Selected Poems 1990-2025 by Kent Fielding is a fearless collection that traverses continents and inner landscapes-Siberia, Kentucky, the Pacific Islands, and the haunted corridors of memory. These poems confront the sacred and the profane, the tender and the brutal, all with Fielding's signature blend of dark wit, mythic vision, and working-class lyricism.

This is a book for readers of contemporary poetry who crave emotional depth, narrative bite, and the wild honesty of lived experience. Through Fielding's voice, we encounter the beauty of coral reefs and the despair of addiction, the electric storm of a daughter's birth and the ghostly silence of a snowman's final breath. The result is a book at once haunted and deeply human, where tenderness survives even the worst betrayals.

From the vivid realism of "Coffee with Adele" and "Kansas City Airport" to the mythic landscapes of "The Goat Woman's Dream" and "River Church Cemetery," Fielding's poems transform trauma, loss, and longing into something fierce, poetic, and enduring.