It's a Blue, Blue World: Poems & Stories (Jan. 2024) by Colby Flade
Praise for It’s a Blue, Blue World:
“The vivid and sensitive awareness that both fills and pulls life in and out of us is what Colby brings to readers with this collection of poems. This offering is brave, bold, timid, transparent, aware, alive and deeply intuitive. What remains on the pages will leave you reeling with a million little afterthoughts.”
— Emily A. Francis, author of Whole Body Healing & Healing Ourselves Whole; @emilyafrancisbooks “Flade's poetry is chameleon-like. While privy to his pain, and personal journey, I also can see my trials and tribulations through his work. It is like those bizarre paintings where everyone feels like the subject's eyes are gazing at them. His poetry is truly transformative and applicable to many situations, and to all walks of life. The amount of emotion, grief, and memory carefully woven into these poems is refreshingly relatable. It’s a Blue, Blue World is a must-have book for your bookshelf and coffee table, to serve as a relaxing read, a reflective tool, or a conversation starter.” — Kera Sanchez, author of Legacy Letters: Leaving Love For Those Who Remain; @legacylettersjournal “This collection includes poems that vary in form and voice, but they cohere through recurrent images, common themes, and a consistent attention to the music of the lines. They present a speaker who is resilient, often funny, and thoughtful about hope and comfort. These poems don’t offer easy answers. There is no panacea for loneliness, abandonment, and bone-chilling cold. Hope can let you down, but it isn’t what hope produces that matters as much as having the balls to hope despite all the evidence to the contrary. In It’s a Blue, Blue World, hope is an act of rebellion; what the heart does when it won’t settle for the bullshit rejection, the wolves and bears and abandoning mothers, the world has offered. Hope is what comes after a deep and clear-eyed study of winter. It’s a comforting thought.” — Nicole Zdeb, author of The Friction of Distance & Tremulous Landscapes (Airlie Press, 2025); @nicole_zdeb “Colby Flade has a remarkable talent for writing poignant, imaginative, and resilient poetry that leaves an indelible mark on the reader’s spirit. It’s a Blue, Blue World finds both absence and completeness in winter landscapes that are truly unique. This collection is thematically winter-centric, a tribute to the season of mortality and sorrow, but also offers a refreshing take on adolescent wonder, maternal disconnect, and the personification of nature. Colby’s collection is a great pick for readers who search for discovery within themselves as well as the world around them. “this is my escape / no mind to the rest / the emptiness / we feel it all anyway / it means something…” It requires vulnerability to write poetry that speaks loudly, and this collection is guaranteed to be thought-provoking at the least.” — Ervin Brown “It’s a Blue, Blue World by Colby Flade eloquently and uniquely captures the essence of winter, love & longing, and despair. Reading this collection was like listening to a great album; each poem and story could stand steadfast on its own, yet combined they work together to convey a profound, relatable message. The smooth flow of the writing also reminds me of music. I personally have been writing poetry since I was 8, and have been on the editorial board of a literary magazine for about 2.5 years. Although I read poetry every day, it isn’t so often that I read a piece and immediately think to myself, “this is going to stick with me in a meaningful way for a long time.” I had that thought many times while reading Colby’s collection. It’s a Blue, Blue World not only made me think, but made me write. That’s one way I know that something I’ve read is powerful— when it inspires my own creativity even amidst a writer’s block.” — Emma McNamara, author of Of My Many Years Of Youth; @author_emma “Flade’s poetry feels empowering, layered, charismatic, but without sacrificing the real pain he is experiencing. A collection of poems that will hold you.” — Nicole Cullinan, 2nd Prize Recipient at The Moonee Valley Art Show 2023 for Best Photograph - Urban Waste; @nicolecullinanposts “In the very middle of Colby Flade's It's a Blue, Blue World is a poem that holds the key to this entire collection. Titled "angels," Flade writes for guidance to "...make it all/anything/everything/even the nothingness/my own." But he doesn't need guidance in achieving this -- he's accomplished it throughout It's a Blue Blue World. Flade has taken the “all/anything/everything” of what it is to be human and created a vivid portrait of this season in his life that is so intimately relatable. Page by page, the reader is offered a peek into his experience through a frost-framed window, though one is never made to feel as a voyeur, rather as a guest at the door, invited to explore the bittersweetness of existence. This portrait of melancholia has so vividly struck a chord with me, I will find myself reflecting on his words as I go about my day. Flade’s It's a Blue Blue World does not shy away from the inevitable anguish within the mere acts of living, breathing, and loving but he is not asking the reader to mourn extensively. Rather, as we witness the surrender to the cold, there is a gentle reminder that it will soon recede, or as Flade himself writes, “warm is on her way.” — Britt Clemens Ryal, Chicago resident & Photographer; @brittryal “Flade has a gift for making oneself remember emotions that were lost or had been long forgotten. It’s a Blue, Blue World delivers a sense of peaceful nostalgia to the soul of any young person. Through Flade’s imagery, the reader will soon be reimagining their surroundings and inner thoughts.” — Brianna Janice, author of The Fool and The Devil; @_briannajanice_ “With depth, creativity, and flare, Colby Flade has created a work of intensity and poetic beauty. The thematic diversity in this collection is both surprising and refreshing. Flade has created here, in It's a Blue, Blue World, an eclectic mix that keeps the reader guessing. This body of work is a testament to Colby Flade's poetic prowess, and is a must-read for poetry enthusiasts and anyone seeking an enriching literary experience.” — Jeff Prickett, Ed.d.; author of Becoming Principal: A Leadership Journey & The Story of School Community; @jdprickett “Shirley Jackson, Edgar Allan Poe, and now Colby Flade. It's a Blue, Blue World is a literary snowglobe: Colby's words are beautiful and delicate, leaving you shaken, haunted in imagery, and lingering in awe. Being someone who experiences the winter blues myself, I often attempt to escape it so as not to entertain these feelings. Yet Colby uses these fragments of feeling and sheer honesty as his medium. It somehow breaks through the frost of his own works, allowing us a look into his raw soul. As humans, this visceral authenticity creates the relatability we seek; this connection is what warms this blue, blue world. Colby reminds us that art can still be made in winter's darkness, light can be found thereafter, and while seasons come and go, we are not alone.” – Jessica Lardizabal, Runway Model & RN; @j.e.s.s.i.mode “Flade jolts readers in the opening of this expansive collection, It’s a Blue, Blue World, then lulls them into a realm where warmth and darkness clash. Each piece is able to hook its way into your thoughts to showcase the desire of longing in the midst of wintry scenes, nightmares, and memories. The details of these poetic landscapes are brushstrokes of how haunting and humbling moments in life can truly be. At the end of it all, one is left to ponder the intricacies of thoughts that linger in the backs of our minds.” — Konner Sauve, Educator & Poet; @konnersauve “Colby Flade’s It’s a Blue, Blue World is a stunning collection of poetry and short stories about survival. Flade weaves powerful imagery of nature with heartrending emotions and creates a book that anyone who has ever struggled with abuse, grief, or mental health will find relatable and comforting. The poem anguish, agony, angst perfectly captures the gut-wrenching moment when you realize a relationship is changing before your eyes and that you can do nothing to stop it. Lemon bars depicts the struggle to regain a sense of normalcy after going through something devastating. Winter is a theme seen throughout this collection, and in the poem holly, Flade reminds the reader that even through the inescapable death that winter brings, there is still hope. The collection’s ending line, “warm is on her way,” is another reminder to readers that winter will always come to an end, the pain will always come to an end. Flade reminds us all that even through the worst of our experiences, there is still hope. There will always be spring again.” — Becky Curl, Chicago-based Writer, Artist & Professor; @becky_curl |
It's a Blue, Blue Worldever since i was a child, i have held a special place in my heart for winter.
in the early, naive years of my life, i perceived winter as beautiful, wholesome, and meaningful. and as much as i try to love winter nowadays, just as i did when i was younger, i can’t help but feel a certain strangeness towards it. everything dies… there is so much death. the atmosphere morphs into a blue abyss… with so little life. so much loneliness… i feel like most people sort of fall into this brumal trance during winter months. i, myself, fall victim to this, as some would call it, ‘seasonal depression’. where i miss the sun. where i crave warmth. where i dream of green. where i long to breathe in the summer air… i sometimes forget that winter ends, eventually; waking up everyday to sheets of ice and blankets of freezing snow, dull gray skies and wicked winds, it all becomes so normal. add in the loneliness, the isolation, and the death… winter seems so difficult to overcome. but each year, i am greeted with the fact that winter does, eventually, come to an end. slowly, everything comes back to life, new seeds take root, animals emerge from hibernation, and those lonely feelings hopefully leave us all. in a way, winter teaches us a very cliché lesson that it always gets worse before it gets better… like winter, you are capable of shutting down, freezing up, and acclimating to a cold, dull, lonely routine. but remember, winter ends. and when that happens, you defrost, and are capable of change, of growth, of living again. so, in a way, winter still is beautiful and meaningful. because it offers us something to take away; something to reflect on; something that teaches us how to cope, how to find light in the dark, how to push through the cold to feel warmth… how to sift through the challenges, and grow despite them… and how to persist through death to live yet again… someday… — colby flade 
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