Pressure Dressing

by Mark Scroggins

Pressure Dressing leaves us wondering where and how deeply are we wounded. In these poems, most especially in the extraordinary title suite, we are kept distracted from our own pain by the poet's talk, his brilliant counterpoint of realities, his interleaving of lives, lived or glimpsed, his words alert to humiliation, to hurt, to beauty, to ideas, to others, and above all, to the transfiguring detail. With virtuosic turns of tone Mark Scroggins sounds out a complex affection for the flesh, telling with no slight elegance the ways we are bound to it, in it, and by it, and the grief we feel at the last farewell. --Joseph Donahue

104 pages, Paperback

Published November 16, 2018

About the author

Born as military brat just down the street (he likes to imagine) from where Theodor Adorno was lecturing on the culture industry & modernist aesthetics. Bounced all over in his formative years -- Monterey CA, Syracuse NY, various bits of Germany, west Texas, western Kentucky -- then more or less settled down in middle Tennessee, but not before contracting a permanent sense of dislocation. Studied at Virginia Tech & Cornell University, with concomitant degrees. Now in south Florida, where he lives with his wife, a scholar of early modern & contemporary drama, & his two just unbelievably beautiful daughters.

Considers poetry his first calling (after several ephemeral chapbooks, Anarchy [2003] his first full-length collection), but has been deeply involved in scholarship on the poet Louis Zukofsky (1904-1978), whose biography he has written.