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.

Dennis Hinrichsen is the author of eight previous books of poetry. His most recent are Rip-tooth (2010 Tampa Poetry Prize) and Kurosawa’s Dog (2008 FIELD Poetry Prize). An earlier work, Detail from The Garden of Earthly Delights, was awarded the 1999 Akron Poetry Prize. New work of his can be found in The Adroit Journal, Fogged Clarity, Four Way Review, Ghost Town, Memorious, Michigan Quarterly, museum of americana, Radar, and Best of the Net 2014, as well as the anthology Poetry in Michigan/Michigan in Poetry from New Issues Press. Hinrichsen lives in Lansing, Michigan.