“These poems are fresh crisp and muscular. They are decisive and fearless. Every object icon or historical moment has a soul with a voice. In these poems these soulful ones elbow their way to the surface of the page smartly into the contemporary now.”—Joy Harjo prize citation from “The Piano Speaks” For an hour I forgot my fat self my neurotic innards my addiction to alignment. For an hour I forgot my fear of rain. For an hour I was a salamander shimmying through the kelp in search of shore and under his fingers the notes slid loose from my belly in a long jellyrope of eggs that took root in the mud.
