Cloud on Page Opposite

Kylan Rice

Free Verse Editions
Edited by Jon Thompson

Release Date: 5 January 2027.

Information and Pricing
978-1-64317-641-3 (paperback, $16.95); 978-1-64317-642-0 (PDF, $9.95); 978-1-64317-643-7 (EPUB, $9.95). © 2027 by Parlor Press, 82 pages.

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Praise for Cloud on Page Opposite

Reading Kylan Rice’s Cloud on Page Opposite I could feel the poet’s transformation of real-life observation to lyrical language as the work of devotion—earthly, carnal, and holy. Inspired by the ecstatic poetry and journals of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Rice reads clouds and perhaps also feels clouds, metaphorical arbiters of our earthy light. Attentive to “the work of letting day become another day,” these gorgeous poems are intricate and grandiose; philosophical and pragmatic. At the heart of each intention lies love, “the jewel the body is inside the spirit’s open palm.” This poetry held me in its grip. —Sally Keith

Early in Cloud on Page Opposite, Kylan Rice muses on his impulse “to think in terms of structure.”  That urgency is everywhere on display in this, Rice’s carefully composed third collection of poetry, which yearns toward the certainties of plumb-line and level. Structure proves here not to be some dry organizational principle but an instrument by which a poem (or a person) might prove true, might achieve fidelity:  the fidelity of a sign to a signified, of spouse to spouse, of human to God, and often all three of these in precarious palimpsest. Cloud on Page Opposite enlists its readers in the labor of truing, ensuring that we remain ever mindful of the ways that a poem might mitigate its own artifice precisely by disclosing its costly engineering. —Kimberly Johnson

Reading these poems one hears familiar cadences of earlier poetries played on a contemporary instrument. And if one wonders at the pertinence or necessity of such regular iambics (that do allow for the occasional trochee and spondee!) or the echoes of Hopkins’ sprung rhythm, one need only read on, to find in the intricacies of this living language, deep sincerity and active lyric thinking. And as with Hopkins, these odes delineate real-world observations transformed into a literary experience: the poem is real whatever the subject, and whatever the subject, the object is music and meaning in harmony, being hearing itself out, singing forward, landing on the right word/thought as the form allows. The voice is burdened with concern, anxious with loving, and tasked always with transforming the shape of thinking into art. The effort here is not the transcendent release of Hopkins’s praise for god’s glory per se, but for the accurate record of being’s complexity, and thought’s involvement, and in the end for poetry’s true and timeless companionship, and that real consolation. —Martin Corless-Smith

With Cloud on Page Opposite, Kylan Rice proves to me that he is our generation’s Donald Justice, not least with his preoccupation with “a certain light.” In electric language lean and textured, Rice steers us prosodically through “quotes and intertexts” that demonstrate his own depth of feeling, as though working over the very material of love itself, of literary creation and procreation, what living with these drives and questions might yet beget. Annotated with an antique care for verse, art, music, nature, marriage and the beloved, Cloud on Page Opposite gives us an extended view into a mind thinking his present, lets us see a poet reaching for his Notes app with a voice that’s as Romantic and discursive as it is tense with lyric teeming. Rice’s mind moves with what it sees and acts on what it feels, whether under the sign of the lurking hyperobject that it senses, like Dickinson’s loaded gun, or recovering the “I” to make a claim both for how to write and how to live. As indexical and approachable as A.R. Ammons, Rice’s unfurling lyrics let you ride along with them, draw you seamlessly into their glittering, elegantly complex thought. For Rice, and for us, the “light is late / but not too late.” —Alicia Wright

About the Author

Kylan Rice is the author of three collections of poetry: An Image Not a Book (2023), Name & Earth (2026), and Cloud on Page Opposite (2027). He is an editor of Thirdhand Books and an assistant professor of English at Utah State University.

Photograph of the author by Elizabeth Poindexter. Used by permission.