Review Reading Christopher Locke's exquisite Trespassers, one can't help but marvel at his masterful command of metaphor and sensory images-startling, often brutal and unsettling, but always apt. In Locke's trespassed landscapes, heat is made palpable as a "heavy broth of light," birds "buckshot" the air, and Aztec gods bear names "like hornets." Poem by poem, Locke's language anoints the ordinary and raises it toward transcendence. Whether set "There" in Mexico or "Here" in a rented house in coastal Maine, these poems navigate between an inner emotional realm, fraught with the speaker's fear of dissolution and loss, and the outer physical world, at once dangerous and comfortingly familiar, where life is nourished-or unexpectedly challenged-by the numinous beauty that "rises / from the common, caught fluttering / in the breath of every day." -Richard Foerster Christopher Locke's poetry is like a fiery dance, stepping between street litter, bopping around broken beer bottles, fetid water into "the places where sunlight comes to die" in Mexico, then twirling and twisting among the "tough angels" and "icy rust" of a Maine winter. Each poem's movement, the brilliant images and alluring language, the cutting emotions, swing you into endings with revelations about life, as if swaying to a new musical chord. You become so smitten that you await the music on the next page to begin the dance again. -Gary Metras, author of The Moon in the Pool About the Author Christopher Locke was born and raised in New Hampshire. He received his M.F.A. from Goddard College and has published four previous chapbooks of poems and two full length collections: "End of American Magic" (Salmon-2010) and "Waiting for Grace & Other Poems" (Turning Point-2013). The recipient of two Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowships, Locke has received grants in poetry from the New Hampshire Council on the Arts, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and Fundacion Valparaiso (Spain). He currently serves as the nonfiction editor at Slice magazine in Brooklyn.