“Hinrichsen’s language is itself an immersion. “It bubbles out//this music//in pure abandon” into a punctuation-free “ricochet cinema” with intense haiku-like close-ups and lines that leap from margin to margin following “little warps in gravity.” Throughout, Hinrichsen’s honesty and often scathing self-scrutiny create intimacy with the reader, facing mortality (“that’s what I saw in the scans”) or encountering animal or human others, like the barefoot “Jesus-in-a-trench-coat” on a bridge over a freeway about whom the poet had “a feeling…I should have given him my shoes.” In one of the last poems, Hinrichsen asks “am I alone in this, or are you just as lost?” It is a pleasure to get lost in this poet’s soundscapes, to explore “loneliness and / or holiness” to be “held…carefully” and, like a sleeping monkey on the other side of the world, stir “to rub (our) eyes in astonishment & wonder.””
Praise for This is Where I live I have nowhere else to go
“To compose this poetry, Hinrichsen invents a prosody: the whole page deployed; passage sutured to passage with slashes and brackets; negative space working (amazingly enough) as connective tissue. Like those double-edges we call “Janus words,” these poems both cleave and cleave, culminating in the magnificently Molly Bloomish “[LO FI CUT] [W/TURTLE & BRIDGE],” a febrile soliloquy that pumps life back into the term stream-of-consciousness. This book teems with heart and mind, and will leave readers breathless.”
About the Author
Dennis Hinrichsen is the author of three chapbooks and nine full-length collections, including [q / lear], a chapbook from Green Linden Press, and Skin Music, winner of the 2014 Michael Waters Poetry Prize from Southern Indiana Review Press. His previous books include Rip-tooth (2010 Tampa Poetry Prize), Kurosawa’s Dog (2008 FIELD Poetry Prize), and Detail from The Garden of Earthly Delights (1999 Akron Poetry Prize). Other awards include the 2015 Rachel Wetzsteon Chapbook Prize from Map Literary for Electrocution, A Partial History as well as the 2016 Third Coast Poetry Prize and a 2014 Best of the Net Award. From May 2017 to April 2019, he served as the first Poet Laureate of the Greater Lansing [MI] area.
