Russ Kesler's previous book of poems is A Small Fire (Pecan Grove Press). His poems have appeared in Quarterly West, Connecticut Review, Southern Humanities Review, and many other journals. He teaches in the English Department at the University of Central Florida where he is poetry editor of The Florida Review.

Books by Russ Kesler:

Other poems on the web by Russ Kesler:
"My Mother Reports from Heaven"
"Three Questions"
"Self Portrait"
"Smoke"

Russ Kesler's Blog.

About As If:

"Russ Kesler’s new book of poems, As If, opens with an expansive image of a 'Hawk high over the gorge,/ its shadow touching/ the pale green of leafing trees ...' and in that image one begins to be drawn into a clear and expansive vision. Here is a poet who combines thought and feeling naturally, who sees with tenderness and precision the beauty and the transience of the world we inhabit.... in poem after poem Russ Kesler gives us the details of a life keenly observed, intensely imagined and freshly presented, a life in which it becomes hard to draw the line between the ordinary and the extraordinary."
—Greg Pape

"Although the title points to the suspension of disbelief, Russ Kesler’s As If could equally be called Now, the ground note sounded throughout this lovely book.... In the company of these poems, one feels oneself to be among those for whom, as Basho put it, 'everything they see is like a flower and everything they imagine is like the moon'—which is to say that in the world of this book where the present is shadowed by history and mortality, beauty and light still have a place. In part, because of their leanness, these poems exude the 'sweet release' of work engaging the whole self, like wood split and carefully stacked 'so the pile will stand.'"
—Debra Kang Dean

"Russ Kesler’s poems, for all the earth and vibrant life that’s in them, can seem like fragile things though that’s wrong. As If accrues real force from quietness and closest observation—page after page, the generosity, the surprise, the humanity, the tough realization, the gentlest new understanding, all in poems that unfailingly do honor and pay reverence to this great art."
—Philip F. Deaver