Poet J. Tarwood explores the human comedy in its ironies and griefs in a globalized world from China to Dubai to the American Midwest.  Strangers are neighbors, neighbors are strangers.  He sees us all--himself included--with the eye of a traveler.

J. Tarwood has been a dishwasher, a community organizer, a medical archivist, a documentary film producer, an oral historian, and a teacher. Currently living in China, much of his life has been spent in East Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East.  He has always been an unlikely man in unlikely places.

"J. Tarwood’s latest collection demonstrates, once again, his superb ear, his unerring sense of pacing and compression, his striking and surprising images and tropes. A long-time world traveler and expatriate, he brings uncommon wisdom and spirituality to his work: like the Jesus in one of his poems, he’s “made damn sure/he was never more/ than just passing through.” In the world but not of it, his point of view allows him a vivid, often brutally honest, perspective: steamy sex, junkyard dogs, abusive fathers who won’t stay dead. These are wonderful, memorable poems". –Philip St. Clair, author of ARIEL CREEK and RED CUP, GREEN LEAVES

". . .[J. Tarwood’s poems reveal] an interior that is quick and indeed weirdly sublime. A wonderful book." —Norman Dubie, author of THE QUOTATIONS OF BONE and THE VOLCANO