Gardner Dorton
ISBN: 978-1-949099-12-6
36 pages


"What happens in that liminal space longing and being left behind? When salvation resides not solely in traditional institutions of organized religion and self-imposed cultural norms, but in the body's own burning? Gardner Dorton wrestles with these questions and more in Stone Fruit. These poems offer respite from various modes of destruction, the oblivion that comes with the failure of memory, the ghosts that endlessly haunt us. Dorton affirms our need to not only be remembered but understood. A promise that 'when it's done, you'll know that the water / that buries us will remember / everything.'"

— Gary Jackson

"Gardner Dorton's Stone Fruit is a stone itself, emulating the smooth and rounded heaviness of our innermost doubts. Dorton interrogates what is supposed to protect us — the human mind, our families, even a higher power — and these poems are proof of what happens when we are left to fend for ourselves. At once a sharp critique and also a loving letter to a past-self, this collection shows us how hard it is to obtain love and acceptance in a world that teaches us the opposite. Marrying the religious with the sensual and the corporeal with the surreal, Dorton paints a stunning portrait of what it means to survive in the face of mental illness and violence. These poems whisper back to themselves and say 'A man, same one, yourself, is trying to stay alive.'"

— Taylor Byas

"Gardner Dorton's Stone Fruit is a book of remarkable conversations — mythical and autobiographical; conjured and relived. Roused by the difficult need to speak of one's emergence from a shadow-filled past, these poems teeter on the edges of loneliness and human need. The miracle of this book is that the Dorton sneaks this darkness past us through a companionable voice. These poems remind us that the principle business of the lyric poem is heartbreak, and, more importantly, how we are able to sing even after."

— Emily Rosko

I take the jacket from your shoulders, and bring a mug to your lips. Drink this tea, this gin, this bleach. Let it clean walls of your veins, the growing masses knotting in your brain. I ask what it's like to be an ant farm. To have a body full of hunger. I ask in circles so you'll stay longer. So your muscles won't concave in front of me. And you slice your arm and show the empty dinner plates inside it. You slice an orange because it's your favorite. Drink and visit a while, stay like you're here in the first place. Like you aren't already gone. Eat the orange as if it didn't drop when I tried to give it to you. Like my dog isn't carrying it in his mouth, wondering who I'm talking to.