Mysterious Island

He reminds us of the magical realism ofGabriel García Márquezand Jorge Luis Borges: "A piano, / With its keys locked under its cover, / Is some giant creature / At the bottom of the sea, /Waiting." Like a painter saturating the colors of Earth, exalting its geography from delirious beauty to war nightmares, Larson takes the reader on a dreamlike journey, filled with flashbacks, family memories, and ghosts. The Philosopher Savantis a moving and powerful tribute to the past, bittersweet, funny, and heartbreaking. Themes of absence, loss and abandonment are set against a backdrop of fire and ice, in a landscape whose gardens, blooming with geraniums, lilies, marigolds, lilac, roses, orchids, honeysuckle and thistle, in "gangrened earth," are reminiscent of Richard Matheson's novel and Vincent Ward's movieWhat Dreams May Come.Melancholic, unflinching and unexpected,The Philosopher Savant, haunted by the likes of Proust, Crane, Whitman, Shihab Nye, Keats and Shakespeare, upon whose shoulders Larson rests, pulsates like jazz and celebrates life. -- Hélène Cardona in Verseville He makes everything greater because he's a smart singer, every poem is a win. Moments shine with an unselfconscious voice. We cannot imagine how easily paint can be applied if we just speak in real time of consequential things with a depth of heart. Within that modest framework the passage of words has a capability and a sphere of influence without limits. The poetry dynamics here are a genuine voice, believable encounters, and the ability to make everything new with the belief that no one's watching you, and nothing can come of it, and there's nothing to get. This is poetry at its best. --Grace Cavalieri in The Washington Independent Review of Books