Self-evident

by Scott Hightower

Poetry. "Many poets could write other poets' poems, but there's no one anywhere who could write a Bill Yarrow poem except Bill Yarrow. With a bizarre grace that suggests a truly individual aesthetic, his poems navigate the razor's edge between the polished and the raw. Like a Dadaist version of John Donne, Yarrow takes an axe to common poetic assumptions, yet delivers all the pleasures of poetry at its best."--Stephen-Paul Martin
"Bill Yarrow is the Sun Tzu of verbal warfare, the Machiavelli of mental strategy. 'Look left, ' he says, and when you look right, anticipating his move, the whiplash hits you from behind. This is a book stolen from the library of the unexpected before it burned. What is it, what is it? A bit of Nicanor Parra's antipoetry, a bit of Vasko Popa's thought experimentation, a bit of Celan's surrealism, a bit of this, a bit of that. As it shifts from allegory to narrative to lyric, you come to understand that this book is not a wonderful beast (part hippopotamus, part threshing machine) but a creature whose parts and attributes are constantly shifting--wings when it needs to be an angel, webbed hands for catching baseballs. How wonderful, how fun, and how different from so many volumes of genial, accomplished, and innocuous poetry."--Tony Barnstone

96 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2012