Praise for So Much More:

So Much More is about Ohio. And yet Ohio, in these poems, resides within each of us. Ohio is all of America. Ohio is a past and present of bullets and violence, a home made of corners. But as this speaker disavows Ohio, he also claims it. These are not only poems of anger and frustration, they also express grief at what was lost, and they envision a future inside the daughter, inside the cicada, inside the deer. These powerful poems believe in Ohio and the fire that will save us all.

—Marianne Chan, author of Leaving Biddle City

Darren Demaree’s So Much More speaker is a husband, father, Ohioan, and a self-deprecating, ambivalent, and sometimes resigned American man whose spirit burns in the shadow of something revolutionary. What readers witness is an amalgamation of proclamations and personal declarations that assert the consequences of the speaker’s generational inheritance and his contributions to its legacy in crucial and chaotic times. We learn “the drowning has to be a choice or this whole ocean is just a monster,” alongside “there are so many / easy-hearted / men in Ohio / & all of them / (including me) / are too fucking weak / to assert / that we have a soul / worth saving.” Reading these poems compares to sprinting through a passionate dream, one you realize you wake from reading the last pages only to immediately enter back into with the day’s tasks, perhaps newly a little sad to have to navigate for yourself.

—Dustin Pearson, author of A Season in Hell with Rimbaud

As Darren C. Demaree points out again and again in So Much More: Abstracts, Unfinished Sequences, and Political Prose Poems, surely it is an absurd act to reassure our children in a world full of violence, political strife, and impending climate disaster where gods as useless as us create borders and we must constantly “…[swing] against the violent tide that almost always looks like a man.” How does one rectify their own complicity in this world of simultaneous connection and disconnection where “[f]athers make the worst historians” and empathy can be fatal? Searching for forgiveness of both the world and of the self, the speaker of these poems acknowledges that “we need to punish the imposters of hope” because “very often we are ghostly before we become ghost.” Demaree ultimately offers readers an explanation that he’s “…not telling you / to burn it all down. I’m telling you / to light every fire you can.” This book’s craving for peace and comfort is palpable, but that craving only sharpens the blows of images and statements conveying all that is neither peaceful nor comfortable in the 21st century.  Reading So Much More: Abstracts, Unfinished Sequences, and Political Prose Poems is gratifying in its familiarity, yet startling in its keen descriptions of destruction and disappointment. It is a book to revisit again and again.

—Megan Neville, author of "The Fallow"