Bill Yarrow

As it shifts from allegory to narrative to lyric, you come to understand that this book is...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. Wrench is a book that raises a welt.

--Tony Barnstone

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CROSSING THE CENTER LINE

He was a Decembrist but he was not

one of the hanged. They dragged his

frozen bones to Magadan where he

toiled in the ruined mines. More than

fresh air, he longed for glimpses of the

speckled light that sparkled off the sea.

He was used to the moldy smell of gold

ore and the whiskey whispers of his

comrades in hell. But he never adjusted

to the crisp loss of Maria to scarlet fever.

And the white nightmares never left him.

One day, he got a letter from his brother.

Their mother had died in a suspicious fire.

He lit a cigarette and filled his shrunken lungs.

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