Things Still Worth Trying To Do

Inviting readers to pause and wonder, Things Still Worth Trying To Do rediscovers the beauty woven into everyday life. In poems rich with luminous imagery and lyrical precision, George Looney explores love, memory, and imagination, moving effortlessly between the sacred and the familiar. Each poem reveals the extraordinary within the ordinary, uncovering joy in unexpected places, meaning in fleeting moments, and a renewed sense of possibility in the world around us.

Celebrating the resilience of the human spirit, this collection reminds readers that poetry has the power to awaken us-offering the quiet assurance that there are still reasons to hope, to create, and to keep reaching for what makes life beautiful.

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"Like Orpheus, we may lose our heads to love, / but it is in love we find our true voices," Looney writes. Clearly, in this collection, Looney has found his true voice. Each poem sings with such passion and lyric intensity, I had to catch my breath between poems for this is a book of praise, of lyric intensity and existential wonder-an exalted hymn to the human body and soul. With the grace of an acrobat, Looney navigates the delicate boundaries between the divine and the ordinary, the past and the present, love and sorrow, and the certainty of loss. Ultimately, the reader cannot help but feel uplifted. Maybe even blessed. -Nin Andrews, author of Son of a Bird

"I admire George Looney's poems. I love the "vanished rivers" and "whiskey-stained breath" that inhabit his poems and tell their stories. I love his world where "everything's in motion" and the way his poems open into a world beside ours, one where everything is brightly, briefly poetry. In short, George Looney is one of the best poets working today. I read him "to stay in the poem and not to sleep." -Al Maginnes, author of Fellow Survivors and Second Line

"George Looney convinces us here that the writing and the reading of poetry are both things still worth doing. Absent either, we'd be left with only the "kind of sleep we stumble through." Asking us to "imagine joy / hasn't been kidnapped" and "to know you're blessed," he offers readers solace in the midst of a world filled with so much loss, making these poems, once again, a gift to us all. -Paula J. Lambert, author of Terms of Venery, Revised