This intimate and haunting collection is a love song, a soliloquy, a work of praise, a call to arms, an offering of abundance. There's an urgency to The Runner's Almanac: what's inside the poet must come out. These are poems of gusto, of movement-walking, jogging, striding, hopping-toward love, inevitably. Amirthanayagam is a poet of plurality who savors how a poem gets out of hand, bursts its banks, spills into the mind of the reader. I think of Amirthanayagam, that sharp and tender poetic voice of his, as a village elder, a guide, a truth-teller. But he's the elder that will hold your feet to the fire and not let you forget. More than ever, in The Runner's Almanac, one feels his "purpose / even clearer, to dedicate what / remains of breath, love and work / to spread the word of poetry."
