David McElroy sees a poem everywhere. In Forced Landing, his crisp lines take us with emotional force around the world in poems worth reading again and again. In Laos, he laments unexploded bombs that “…killed and wait to kill / Pathet Lao and now their grandchildren / farmers hoeing rice.” At hospice care, where his wife “is dying two feet away,” he is “…alone as a man can be / whose wife of skin and bone is sleeping / finally…” McElroy touches back down in Alaska with the title poem, where an aircraft loses power off Kodiak…and he engages in an epic struggle to survive: “I am somehow out the back door / and swimming up the blue-green gloom. / And then there is air, air everywhere. / Trees bending in a breeze over on shore...”

— Doug Pope, author of The Way to Gaamaak Cove