Experiencing Scott Poole’s poems is like visiting inside the human brain. His words pulse with electric life, and carry the reader on a torrent of wonderful energy to encounter marvel after marvel. A narrator grows corn inside his garage, another person bounces basketballs off a Rodin sculpture, a man sticks his foot into a coal mine on a Spring day permitting hundreds of tiny miners to escape. A sensitivity quivering with the terror and joy of existence inhabits this poetry. A man temporarily abandons replacing a broken automobile starter to savor the perfection of babies. Another realizes that living beings posses a power such that death / can’t completely inhabit the body. Poole’s words would convince anyone that our species will endure and triumph. Humorous, thoughtful, and vibrating with magic, the poems of Hiding from Salesmen are simultaneously vehicle, idea, organic compound and music. The future of poetry—hey, the future of humanity—is in good hands if it’s in Scott Poole’s hands. –Tom Wayman