Off Coldwater Canyon

Tender is the word I thought of while reading Off Coldwater Canyon. This is the story of a young man, a paradise he found, and how that paradise-the gay community of Los Angeles in the early '80s-was destroyed by the AIDS epidemic. Emerson's poetry is so honest, its narrative so clear, that his compassion runs through every line: in the care he gave to his dying friends, the comfort he later tried to offer as a caregiver for strangers, and the blunt descriptions of the hollow aftermath and long road to recovery. This is a big-hearted poet, and a book that remembers and doesn't look away. -Amy Miller, Contest Judge, 2020 and author of The Trouble with New England Girls In this breathtakingly beautiful, heartbreakingly personal elegy to friends and lovers lost in the early days of the AIDS epidemic, C.W. Emerson maps a journey from innocence hungry for experience to experience hungry for lost innocence. Off Coldwater Canyon is not only an elegy to all those men who died too soon, but to a whole lost world of sensuality, possibility, daring. And if there's no way back to that particular world, Emerson ends his suite of poems with a path that opens toward another. -Cecilia Woloch, author of Tsigan: The Gypsy Poem The radiant from which Off Coldwater Creek emanates is the body's own perishable luminosity, these poems the lyric record of the body's trajectory as a falling star-meteoric, brief-during the height of the AIDs pandemic: While these poems possess the power to make a reader weep, Emerson, himself, never succumbs to a poet's vainest temptation: to eulogize mourning. Instead, Emerson dignifies the paths of those who have crisscrossed his own with a limpid accuracy that pinpoints and transpierces the essence of our fleeting existence and names it, a quality that destines this collection to become a classic in league with Thom Gunn's The Man with Night Sweats. -Lise Goett, author of Leprosarium