Damron

Lambda Literary Award Finalist

These never-before published poems, hailed by former Poet Laureates Bill Stafford and Josephine Jacobsen, are for people "who don't usually read poetry."

"Snapshots from a life in progress, these wonderful poems speak bravely about our own occasions of joy, loss, and remembrance. There is less sadness here than one might expect. The pleasure of these lines comes from a deeper place. Such wisdom reflects its own remarkable light."
- Mark Thompson, author of Gay Spirit: Myth and Meaning.

Krandall Kraus' The Christmas Poems collects all Kraus' Christmas poems written and sent to friends each year since 1976.

Kraus, a Lambda Literary Award winner, has also been a Borestone poet and second prize winner of the Raymond Carver International Short Story Competition.

The Christmas Poems contains not only two and a half decades of Christmas poems, but Kraus has written a notation for each one, elaborating on the poem and how it reflects what was happening to him the year the poem was written. In many ways, it could be considered a memoir in poetry.

The poems chronicle the poet's inner journey and the way in which he faced and dealt with new love, the loss of friends, a growing spiritual and emotional awareness, and the meaning of the Christmas story in a modern world.

This handsome edition is seven inches square and the cover includes a very Zen-like pine tree painted by his partner of eleven years, Paul A. Borja, with whom Kraus shared the 2000 Lambda Literary Award for their book, It's Never About What It's About: What We Learned About Living While Waiting To Die.