"These poems are written by a true poet, someone in love with the world and mad at it too, and they are also written by a very particular poet, Dobby Gibson, who is madly in love with the other mysterious inner world each of us possesses and reveals when no one else is looking. 'It may be true that everything / has already been said, / but it's just as true that not everyone / has had a chance to say it.' How can one not listen to the innards of a young poet who announces as much and then sets out, in his first book, to make it new? One can't not listen. One must."-Mary Ruefle

A poetry descended from the New York School, Dobby Gibson's award-winning debut is witty and expansive, driven by precise, interconnected abstractions. Gibson writes about desire in American life, observing, "Amid the middleness, / there's the feeling / that anything can be seen / and nothing reached," seeking his truths in misunderstandings and the relentless Midwestern winter.

From No Wake

The snowflakes taxi. The full moon coolly
punctuates its own fantastic, howls the ohs

of its own vowels. The firemen stop for directions.
The children light cigarettes and wish

they had invented their own feelings.
The explorers who discovered only oceans

we cannot name. In the distant universe
there are things older than the light

that illuminates the firmament, a place where every
thought is a kind of unmarked car,

where women wait inside the revolving door
with a spritz of perfume and a secret

for some newer side of ourselves
we will recognize only in what little it will admit.

Dobby Gibson holds an MFA in fiction from Indiana University. His poems have appeared in The Iowa Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, Fence, and elsewhere. He is the recipient of a $25,000 McKnight Foundation poetry fellow-ship and two Pushcart nominations.