Heaven Unbuilt encompasses the entirety of Colin Dodds’ career as a poet, which spanned more than twenty years, beginning in the late 1990s. It includes selections from early books The Last Man on the Moon and The Blue Blueprint, the entire Spill-O cycle, decades of poems from bars, selected lyrics from the band Adultogram and the 2018 collection Spokes of an Uneven Wheel.

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“Eloquent, elegant, emotionally and intellectually engaging, deftly crafted, impressively memorable… the ideal showcase for the tangible results of a lifetime of creating poetry by a master wordsmith… A major volume of verse and one to be brought back to again and again and again, ‘Heaven Unbuilt’ is especially and unreservedly recommended…” – Midwest Book Review

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These poems have appeared in more than three hundred publications. The late poet and songwriter David Berman (Silver Jews, Actual Air) said of them: “These are very good poems. For moments I could even feel the old feelings when I read them.” This edition of Heaven Unbuilt is complete, having been assembled to mark Colin’s retirement from poetry.

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“There is a lot here. Of realism, of life in your face, of fantasy, of just about everything one could write about over those twenty-two years… a winding journey of running from demons, chasing angels, cris crossing the country… Dodds is a craftsman who has an innate ability to create unique imagery that flows like a waterfall of harsh realism… heaven and hell, words from urinals, apocalypse, dead choruses, dancing clouds of saturated skies of imagination loosed as a torrent upon the page. There are bars, drug dealers, politicians, great truths and great lies… a cacophony of images and sounds exploding upon the page. Dodds proves to be a master crafter of the poem with remarkable fresh if not disturbing images… It may take you into the brisk leaf filled air of autumn, to the first flurries of winter to complete the read. It will be well worth it. Poets like Dodds only pass through every so often. Get the book and throw a punch at life.” – North of Oxford

“When I read Colin’s work, one of his own lines comes to mind: “What persists / is glad amazement.” His work consistently delights with humor, inventiveness, a blessed dose of sarcasm and, yes, wisdom (despite his best intentions). We are all “born for that other thing,” and this is that other thing.” – Sharon Mesmer, author of Greetings From My Girlie Leisure Place

“People pick up a book of poetry at leisure, but can find themselves stopped in their tracks, pacing the room, weeping at an insight or a way of looking at things that simply hadn’t found that magic formula of words to express before. Colin Dodds is the kind of writer who believes in this.” – Blognostics

“A vividly and inventively dark dystopia… This is intelligent writing, the images are often startling and usually thought-provoking… Powerful work and well worth anyone’s time.” – Pulsar Poetry

“Colin Dodds’ cataclysm of phrases and lines, broken by a tough guy making good on his promises, has got the Zarathustra thunder of myth and the You Can’t Win resignation of Jack Black (not the singer, the old grifter-writer who sent William Burroughs to the interzone). He provides us with sharp knives of the low life mind and a cathartic liturgy genuflecting for an exit. Spokes of an Uneven Wheel speaks for noses out of joint, joints out of town, and entire towns out of luck. And we are there too, among the overcast of characters. Maybe we’re at the helm of a ship that sunk before it was built. Or maybe we’re prisoners not of walls, but expanse, free to roam forever with zero chance of escape. Being bad at things is the one thing we’re good at. Like a singer songwriter whose masterpiece depends on laryngitis and a guitar in the pawnshop, in total exile from easy street. But exile from is also exile to, where despite the bleak economics, overbooked disappointment calendars, and a landscape of scapegoats, we prevail together. Life is uneasy, dark, and essentially impossible, yet here we all are. Under Dodds’ gaze, our existence is the obtained unobtainable which easily surrounds the darkness… sometimes.” – Brendan Lorber, author of If this is paradise why are we still driving?

“Narratives breathe life into the overlooked… Spill-O is the martyr of the authentic conscious mind, journeying and suffering at the hands of the corruption and sickness that plagues the linguistic and sentimental plains… honest and unflinching…” – Furious Gazelle

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