Gee these poems be limber, you think, flipping thru the pages, admiring, here, the cut of this poem’s jib, there the poise & rancour of another.

For this is a book that might save your heart, a book to pull from your jacket pocket at some moment of last judgement & wave at the gate keeper, a tall and bearded dude, surely a hipster - avant la lettre but also after it - outside of time in fact, where final judgements are, and truth and poetry. You wave it at him. It’s a talisman, dude, you say. ‘An earnest,’ says the figure, ‘of your capacity for cool and rigour?’ He nods and you smile. You both smile - and he waves you in.

Praise for Ken Bolton:

‘…bitchy, dreamy, acute…a deeply serious - & witty & almost self-canceling - consciousness at work’ - Lyn McCredden, Heat

‘Easy to appreciate, lightheartedness is not a natural or easy gift, and Bolton’s - brilliantly articulate - shimmers with a sense of being 'amusing & sort of/ Crooked in relation to things’ - Nicholas Birns, Transnational Literature