DEAD MOUSE POEMS is something of a shape-shifter. One reviewer describes it as "surprising" and "often laugh-out-loud funny." While the poetry is in places humorous or quirky, with little warning the tone turns somber, then uplifting, then perplexing, sometimes marked by a serene fatigue. The poet's observations are frequently ambivalent, occasionally unsettling, and consistently original. Title aside, it is not only the corpses of rodents one finds within these pages. Other dead creatures also appear--a horse, a cat, a fish, a few human beings--as well as much that is alive. Centrally...

This fresh collection of free verse and prose poems has subject matter both familiar (nature, grief, dreams) and surprising--such as thirteen poems, interspersed throughout the collection, which focus on the last moments in a crow's life. Settings are as diverse as supermarkets, city streets, Asia, the sea, a hot tub, and the moon. Various characters come to life: a Native American panhandler, a penny-pinching doctor, a retired teacher, a man with a nervous daschund, an oxygen-depleted astronaut, Jesus Christ descending from heaven in an elevator, an 8th century Chinese poet, and of course...