Review The poems of Douglas Haynes are delicately sculpted, compassionate, and smart. He’s a poet of bright imagination and considerable charm, with a discerning eye for details both startling and suggestive. His poems are fearless in taking on the body’s startling revelations, the way the corporal self “remembers/like summer dusk/in a northern country/where evening’s broken skin/blurs the horizon.” This is a book of hard-won beauty and wisdom, the kind of poetry readers can embrace with their full hearts.                                                                                     —Allison Joseph, author of My Father’s Kites and recipient of the Academy of American Poets Prize In Douglas Haynes’s Last Word, we are reminded that there are no enchiridia when we are dealing in full measure with the hollowness of a marriage or cancer, which “lurks like a toothy beast behind every tree.” In Haynes’s poems of beauty and ponderance, we are shown that while metaphor isn’t always enough, it is sometimes necessary to move us closer to the hue and feel, the scale and pitch, of the unutterable and elusive.—Abayomi Animashaun, author of The Giving of Pears and Sailing for Ithaca     About the Author Douglas Haynes grew up in Iowa and Illinois and earned an MFA in creative writing from Southern Illinois University Carbondale. He also studied languages and literature in Germany, Ireland, Guatemala, and Mexico. After years of world wandering, he returned to the Upper Midwest, where he is an associate professor of English at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh. Haynes's poems and translations of German and Irish poetry have appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, Crab Orchard Review, Poetry Ireland Review, Terrain and many other journals in the US, Canada, and Europe. Last Word is his first collection of poetry. His essays and journalism are also widely published, and he is the author of the narrative nonfiction book Every Day We Live Is the Future: Surviving in a City of Disasters (University of Texas Press). He lives with his family in Madison, Wisconsin between a lake, a corn field, and an abandoned feed mill. More about him and his work can be found on his website: www.douglas-haynes.com.