G. E. Patterson’s other collections are Sustenance (1998 Colorado Book Award Finalist) and No Accident (winner of the 2006 Nebraska Book Award and the Balcones Poetry Prize). He lives in southern Colorado.

Books by G. E. Patterson: To and From, Tug

Other poems on the web by G. E. Patterson:
"The Responsibility of Love"
"It May Happen"
"Mary"
Five poems

About To and From:

"In this wonderful book, perception’s ecstatic transit is lovingly engaged, and the distance between to and from opens into endless possibility. Companioned by the speech of the Western tradition old and new, these poems negotiate ‘how . . . we long to think in terms of wholes’ and foreground what Ann Lauterbach has called 'the whole fragment’ available in an instant/instance. Aggression can't live in the world G.E. Patterson envisions in this book. We are lucky to have a poet of such tenderness among us."
—Claudia Keelan

"The intention of these fine poems is to be found in the title To and From. Each poem is surrounded by an arcana of words (mostly commonplace) gleaned from other poets’ poems, words that when strung together slide into the poem by Patterson himself. His poems are addressed to a mercurial, form-changing You. The result is paradoxically impersonal, transcending individual and place. One line captures the whole process: ‘That loss you know might become anyone.’"
—Fanny Howe

"To and From is a colloquy that finds the ‘I’ in conversation with other selves: with the beloved, the landscape, and the language. In particular, each discrete and sinuous fourteen-line composition bears—in the supra-title space that might be taken as the back of the poem's mind, or the tip of its tongue—the traces of other writers. These words and names are incantations of friendship. G.E. Patterson’s poetry flows back and forth through these citation/salutations, giving meaning to the fragments as it receives meaning from them, touching into realms of humor, melancholy, sardonic observation, and dreamy embodiment. His perfect lines drift at the speed of breath. They undo the self and realign it with a vast, pulsatile ‘we . . . pleased / To think our thoughts might be taken as music.’"
—Frances Richard