paper • 64 pages • 12.95
ISBN-10: 1-884800-11-4
Winner of The Four Way Books Award Series in Poetry
selected by Alberto Alvarez Ríos
RADIO TOOTH
You have to stop searching
Until you find it
The borrowed woodcut buried all that year
A black Madonna in a peasant skirt
In the entire house nowhere
Its owner begging its return
Until one night flying low above the door
A little trickier through the doorframes
When I woke there she was in the very drawer
Or like the crystal set built in youth
Wrapping a toilet-paper tube with copper wire
The crystal gleaming like a silver molar
The night sky salted with stars
When I could hardly stand the hissing in my ears
The static weakened to a thread of music
Look with all your eyes
Listen with your bad tooth aching
Something’s out there
“Jenkins’ resolutions and truces are indomitably surreal; these poems—on geography, genetics, faith, and loss—are jokes and non-jokes at once, dazzlingly off, yet pure reportage . . . a wild inventiveness proves out a weird, heightened hope.” —The New Yorker
“These energetic poems halt and plunge forward in associative bytes, facilitated by their lack of punctuation and Jenkins’ terrific personal prosody, a style of phrasing which is both irregular and rhythmic.” —Tony Hoagland, Puerto del Sol
“His revolutions on the ‘treadmill of sad-ness and consolation’ produce luminous, resonant lyrics.” —Brian Henry, Harvard Review