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“Whether investigating the microscopic structure of a snowflake or the ‘unheard hiss’ of a signal flare, John Nimmo's inquisitive poems invoke spaces just beyond human reach. They ask nothing less than that we remake the world, not in our own image, but in ‘absence whose shape you are.’ Keenly intelligent and finely-crafted, Nimmo's poems resound with impossibility of transcendence and the miraculous redemptive power of the everyday.” --Alix Anne Shaw, author of Undertow, winner of the Lexi Rudnitsky Poetry Prize, and Dido in Winter “The Sistine Chapel and the dentist’s lead apron. The stuff of the universe and the backyard incineration of garbage. A moon rock, a mud bath, and the night Hawaii became a state. These fine poems are meditations that seek to clarify the human position: our relationship to the living and the dead, to art and the divine, to the knowable and the unknowable. In ‘Signals’ Nimmo writes, ‘a ship will come,/one who sees/what we see’. Nimmo’s poems become the ship. Through them, we are gifted with new sight; we are finally able to see what has been in front of us all along. With scientific precision and much grace, these poems reveal to us a remarkable vision.” --Brittany Perham, author of The Curiosities |
Contents:
The Sacrament of Theft
Creation ex Nihilo
Stick Shellac
Signals
Christmas without Parents
If You Took the Sistine Chapel
In the Days of Backyard Incineration
Lead Apron
My Father Crocheted
Of What is Absent
Key West, Florida—Midnight
Moon Rock, August 1969
Girl, Post Revolution
Changing Planes
6:00 a.m. Hawaiian Standard Time
Swimming in the Little Colorado
Sammamish
Into Mud
The Sacrament of Theft
Creation ex Nihilo
Stick Shellac
Signals
Christmas without Parents
If You Took the Sistine Chapel
In the Days of Backyard Incineration
Lead Apron
My Father Crocheted
Of What is Absent
Key West, Florida—Midnight
Moon Rock, August 1969
Girl, Post Revolution
Changing Planes
6:00 a.m. Hawaiian Standard Time
Swimming in the Little Colorado
Sammamish
Into Mud