J. Tarwood's latest collection demonstrates, once again, his superb ear, his unerring sense of pacing and compression, his striking and surprising images and tropes. A long-time world traveler and expatriate, he brings uncommon wisdom and spirituality to his work: like the Jesus in one of his poems, he's "made damn sure / he was never more / than just passing through." In the world but not of it, his point of view allows him a vivid, often brutally honest, perspective: steamy sex, junkyard dogs, abusive fathers who won't stay dead. These are wonderful, memorable poems.
—Philip St. Clair, author of Acid Creek and Red Cup, Green Lawn
It's not surprising that at the interior of this new work there's a crisis, a polarization of language that surprises music; imagery that surprises, or even ambushes, first ideas. So we have all the brilliant familiar lyric exterior that is expected, but then all the new risks of an interior that is quick and indeed weirdly sublime. A wonderful book.
—Norman Dubie, author of The Quotations of Bone and The Volcano
J. TARWOOD has been a dishwasher, a community organizer, a medical archivist, a documentary film producer, an oral historian, and a teacher. Much of his life has been spent in East Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East. Currently living in China, he has published four books, The Cats in Zanzibar, Grand Detour, And For The Mouth A Flower, and What The Waking See, and his poems have appeared in magazines ranging from American Poetry Review to Visions. He has always been an unlikely man in unlikely places.
ISBN 978-1-938144-69-1
$20.00 BrickHouse Books
J. Tarwood's latest collection demonstrates, once again, his superb ear, his unerring sense of pacing and compression, his striking and surprising images and tropes. A long-time world traveler and expatriate, he brings uncommon wisdom and spirituality to his work: like the Jesus in one of his poems, he's "made damn sure / he was never more / than just passing through." In the world but not of it, his point of view allows him a vivid, often brutally honest, perspective: steamy sex, junkyard dogs, abusive fathers who won't stay dead. These are wonderful, memorable poems.
—Philip St. Clair, author of Acid Creek and Red Cup, Green Lawn
It's not surprising that at the interior of this new work there's a crisis, a polarization of language that surprises music; imagery that surprises, or even ambushes, first ideas. So we have all the brilliant familiar lyric exterior that is expected, but then all the new risks of an interior that is quick and indeed weirdly sublime. A wonderful book.
—Norman Dubie, author of The Quotations of Bone and The Volcano
J. TARWOOD has been a dishwasher, a community organizer, a medical archivist, a documentary film producer, an oral historian, and a teacher. Much of his life has been spent in East Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East. Currently living in China, he has published four books, The Cats in Zanzibar, Grand Detour, And For The Mouth A Flower, and What The Waking See, and his poems have appeared in magazines ranging from American Poetry Review to Visions. He has always been an unlikely man in unlikely places.
ISBN 978-1-938144-69-1
$20.00 BrickHouse Books
