Chris Ransick's short fiction collection, A Return to Emptiness, was a fiction finalist for the 2005 Colorado Book Award. His first book, Never Summer, Poems From Thin Air, won the 2003 Colorado Book Award. Chris became Denver's poet laureate in early 2006.

About Lost Songs & Last Chances:

"The collection's voice pulses with surprising turns and a deep mystical playfulness with language, offering songs meditative, rich, and keenly aware of the power of silence and observation. [It] bring us elegies for the land, for loved ones, for the west and its diverse peoples and histories, offering a balm for our own losses. Wry humor mixes with uncanny wisdom, deep lyrical waters to nourish us in our fragility, our own place in a seemingly contradictory natural world. Poems about boyhood, youthful adventure, old age, war, and survival echo in a voice that asks, 'What voice could join these harmonies and last as long as water and wind?' So we too dive deep into our nameless vanishing, to the bottom of the ocean with Ransick in this ambitious collection that heals with a lively movement from lamentation to praise."
—Sheryl Luna

"With sweeping range in both subject and form...here is a confident voice that is sometimes intimate, other times humorous, and always candid. These are clear-sighted, engaging poems, the work of a writer with a sharp eye and an ear tuned to 'the river’s full-throated song.'"
—Albert Garcia

"These are good poems, but they’re also good stories. They swim in a deep pool of experience and the leaps you make in and out of the water embolden your spirit. You'll want more of these dramas, ones you sometimes recognize, yes, but dressed up—lyric negligees spun like alpaca fleece from the weavings of a father, husband, and free—thinking mime of the wildly imaginable moment."
—Art Goodtimes