Donald Illich
In Rescue is Elsewhere, humans are abducted by disappointed UFOs, an astronaut is returned home to Earth by aliens, moon creatures steal our comedians, and a boy dreams of building a rocket to fly to another planet. Alternately serious and satirical, Donald Illich explores the phenomenon of UFOs and how they shape our imagination and lives. His poems unravel from the outer reaches of space to the neighborhood that you or I might live in, and the magic of language brings to the page multiple worlds hidden in the universe. Illich’s collection belongs in the sci-fi section of the library, where its tales can rub up against the fiction in classic pulp magazines of the 20th century.
The collection also features two bonus sci-fi stories, Paper Dad and Apple Sky.
This book is published by Red Ogre Review via a grant from the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers Association.
Readers Say
A good book of poems finds its way into your days, into your thoughts and habits. A great book of poems, though, wraps you in its light and pulls you into its own universe. This is exactly the experience I get reading Donald Illich’s new collection, Rescue is Elsewhere. These poems whisk you into space. They probe and they reveal. More than anything, these lines yearn for connections. They lead us toward communion with the vastness of space through the tiniest of keyholes, the most human of wishes. Pick up this book. Follow this poet. You’ll be grateful for the journey.
Jack B. Bedell, Against the Woods’ Dark Trunks & Poet Laureate of Louisiana, 2017 – 2019
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These poems take us to other worlds, literally. Donald Illich has crafted a collection of space poems, reminiscent of 50s drive-in movies and pulp magazines. In the style of great sci-fi, many times, the aliens in Illich’s poems represent other things: jingoism, a launching place for talk of environmental destruction, fears about the future.
“I don’t want to know what I don’t know,” one character says. In most cases, the aliens represent something beautiful and otherworldly, something that can lift us out of the humdrum day-to-day focus on ourselves. The question is are we going to hide in the basement or embrace the light?
CL Bledsoe, You Hated Us for Our Wings So We Never Flew
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The poems of Rescue Is Elsewhere take us to outer space and back, but our real journey involves the mind of Donald Illich: a place of intelligence, wit, and compassion. Like Tony Hoagland and Campbell McGrath, he is a chronicler of attention and wonder, and a singular fabulist for our time.
J.D. Smith, Transit
