Rackets and Batteries

The thought makes the line, the line moves the thought.

These poems explore Chris Gutkind's preoccupations: time, history, society, technology and denaturing, humans and their relation to various states of being and events. It involves what is happening within and between us, what is more solid and what is more fluid, what we ask of reality and what it asks of us, how determined we are, how free to affect things, how our sensing is doing. Who is war for? How do myths live? What is caring? How do we seek and hide? What does remembering do? What happens after we die? How do we break apart or stay porously whole? What is escape? What is engagement? How much do we let in? How much do we let out? Who are we and who will we be? Whose questions work into whose answers? Can poetry keep us reaching?

This is a companion volume to the author's first collection, Inside to Outside (Shearsman). While that book is sectioned this comes in one sequence, a long collage, including poems not in the first collection and more recent work. Like Inside to Outside these poems are fairly straightforward, whereas a previous Knives Forks Spoons collection, Options, done with artist Trevor Simmons, is more innovative. A very different book of such work, Digits After Orph (Veer) is forthcoming.