Skin Music

2014 Michael Waters Poetry Prize co-winner

Skin Music seeks provisional Edens of being and knowing across a spectrum of ever-changing--flooded, flooding--landscapes. The central motifs, skin and music, are lenses to this inquiry as the poems branch out from a Midwest river town ethos, the geography of family and the breakdown of the local body to the larger, more permanent skins of poetry, art and music. The poems "try on" dialysis and Celan, they "try on" Kline and Parkinson's, they reach out against the shutting down of each moment 600 years into a future built on the chords of a John Cage composition. Lyrical and driven, they strive for that shared human desire of residence in a believable, knowable place.