Skrag

Poems that take the skin off emotion, let laughs out like hens from the roost: Skrag, farm mongrel, springs to the whistle in bony narrative, endearing as the musk he charms and obeys; “Descartes & Dick,” mad-cap Western, turns Descartes loose on a plane of rustic lunacies where cowboys attend closely upon ladies and the finer points of grammar; lyrics, including “The Cottage Poems,” stray through a landscape of pain and rejoicing where those who wait are sustained by the smallest miracles.