Polishing the Mountain, or Catching Balance Just in Time: Selected Poems 2008-2020 - by V. B. Price

Polishing the Mountain, or Catching Balance Just in Time is Albuquerque poet V. B. Price’s second collection of selected poems. This volume compiles largely unpublished work, both individual poems (such as “Chaco Nights,” the latest of his Chaco poems) and large suites (such as Homeric America and the Museum Poems). It also excerpts previously published work, including Memoirs of the World, Rome MMI, and Price’s Christmas poems.

The Casa Urraca Press exclusive hardcover edition comes with a case laminate cover and dust jacket featuring the artwork of Rini Price. The bookstore edition is perfect bound with a matte laminate paperback cover. Both editions are run on 50# cream paper, printed and bound in the United States.

V. B. Price has worked continuously as a reporter and an environmental & political columnist since the 1960s, and he has been publishing poetry since 1962. His works include The Orphaned Land: New Mexico’s Environment Since the Manhattan Project and numerous poetry collections, such as Innocence Regained: Christmas Poems from Casa Urraca Press. He recently received the 2021 New Mexico Literary Arts Gratitude Award for contributions to the life of the poetry community in New Mexico and the Southwest, and he has also been elected to the Board of Directors for the Leopold Writing Program. He lives in Albuquerque.

“This is a remarkable collection of poems capturing a dozen years where frailties and strengths are interwoven to create a rope from which hope and doubt hang together. Así es la vida, and Price’s Selected Poems 2008–2020 reminds us that even in the faintest ripple in the gravity of history we are, but we are not. The collection’s eloquence and articulation hum with the poetics of a life fully lived and do not look back in regret.”

– Levi Romero, inaugural New Mexico Poet Laureate

“Reading V. B. Price’s latest collection is like cracking open a geode, revealing a dazzling array of poetic concerns. These poems contain fragments of experience, wisdom, and even conflict. Price’s words are somehow both the hammer and the stone—and the heavy whack that splits the geode into radiant halves.”

– Amaris Feland Ketcham, author of Glitches in the FBI and A Poetic Inventory of the Sandia Mountains

“V. B. Price’s poems remind us that beautiful construction is part of what makes reading poetry enjoyable. The craft of these poems, the sound, the syllable, the line, the shape and white space, create delight on every page while at the same time being transparent. We forget the technical and are lifted into a world where the mundane becomes magical and we are reminded to gasp and take in how lucky we are to be human and live in this world as we see it through his eyes.”

– Jonatha Kottler, writer (The Guardian, Audible, Longreads) and teacher

“Humane, deep, joyful, feral, challenging, beautiful, and always always always welcome. V. B. Price is a better poet than we deserve.”

– Daniel Abraham, co-author of the New York Times bestselling series The Expanse