Cage of Water: Poems

The poems in Cage of Water explore collisions of spirit and matter, that thorn-and-thistle bath, as he states in the book’s final poem, where the limitations and entanglements of the flesh give over to provisional and sometimes fractured radiance and everlasting. This radiance takes many forms – an uncle with Downs Syndrome calling the makes of cars through hrsh lght, Gds lght, faltring ner th crwn of the skul ; a woman’s neck cords flaring, leaping out in muscular form, fluted/arc/briefly held instant ; his father sleeping, bird cry/pouring/out of him/like string/or/knotted rain , as the narrator resists waking him and lets mosquitoes feed. Confronted with the natural world, Hinrichsen peers closely at such things as mules standing in the rain, the flight of a swallowtail, or cloudwork lighting the weave of trout, and fashions uncanny threadings of self and other.