Good poetry explores the contradictions, the nuances, the baffling repudiations that inform our multiple selves as we trudge through the years allotted us. In Jamie Dopp’s latest collection, we are invited to see the world through the eyes of a father, a son, a husband, a teacher and writer, each iteration a facet on the prism that makes up the author. In a style that echoes the narrative lyricism of Hoagland and Dunn, Dopp tells stories to convey a sensibility that is both light and dark, both fist and oen palm, using language that is familiar and yet startling, bending always towards a singularly clear, exquisite truth.

Terrance Young, author of Smithereens and The Island in Winter (short-listed for the Governor General’s Award for Poetry)

It is easy to get lost in the beauty of the words and images in Getting Lost Going Home. Dopp is an astute observer of life—its ironies, its tragedies, its wary edges and, most of all, its grace. With exquisite honesty he maps the often-complicated terrain of relationships, yet beneath each observation is a bedrock of connection, faithfulness, and love. This is a poet who is attached, deeply, to his growing-up-too-soon sons, his aging father and dying mother, his long-time life partner Wendy, his hockey mates and dogs and the natural and human-created world he inhabits. Through the intimacy of the poetic portraits he provides, we as readers come to care about them as well.

Laura Apol, author of A Fine Yellow Dust, winner of the Midwest Book Award for poetry, former Lansing Michigan poet laureate. 

This is the kind of poetry that stretches evening into night and leaves you happy to have followed along.

Richard Harrison, author of On Not Losing My Father’s Ashes in the Flood (winner of the Governor General’s Award for Poetry)