Children of Obscura: This Mysterious Human, Dane Cervine's second book of prose poems with Sixteen Rivers Press, combines a luminous array of scientific facts with enigmatic stories—stories not only about human life but, importantly, about the complexities of physical life itself, the intricacies of matter flowering into entire worlds. Cervine's accessible and intriguing poems reflect the wonders of both the physical science to which we're bound and the physio-anthropology of humans on this obscure planet rotating in the vastness of space. Children of Obscura takes us on a journey that is part cabinet of curiosities, part Zen-imbued guided tour, each poem surprising, each poem a koan of its own.

Dane Cervine lives in Santa Cruz, California, where he works as a therapist and writer. He graduated from the University of California at Santa Cruz with a B.A. in Religious Studies; and the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco with a Masters in Integral Counseling Psychology. Through long association with the Emerald Street Writers and Poetry Santa Cruz, Dane has nurtured, and been nurtured by, a lively literary scene in the Monterey Bay and Greater San Francisco Bay region. Dane's poems have won awards from Adrienne Rich, Tony Hoagland, Atlanta Review, and Caesura, and have been nominated for multiple Pushcarts. His work has appeared in The Sun Magazine, The Hudson Review, Poetry Flash, Catamaran, Miramar, Rattle, Sycamore Review, and Pedestal Magazine, as well as in many anthologies. This is his second book of prose poems with Sixteen Rivers Press.

"The poems of Children of Obscura are koans, prose poems, a stretching out of the traditional haibun; they use known forms to build new. These are poems that unite the poets and scientists, about how knowledge helps and blinds us, written with a poet's delight in language. Cervine looks at how that 'grand but broken scheme' we call curiosity 'feeds on the unknown like an addiction.' He is driven by that same curiosity to research, to keep asking questions. Propelled by an awe found in factoids about skin, hair, sexual attraction, astrophysics ('even the explainable is so odd as to elicit wonder'), the poet probes how human consciousness—and concerted attempts to understand it—have brought us to our contemporary context. The world's 'web of entanglements,' instructs Cervine 'to read its green meaning' even as he concedes that that 'most of what we are lies in tectonic geography beneath.'" — Farnaz Fatemi, Author of Sister Tongue