The World At Hand is a collection of poems about the world immediately around us, but since J. Tarwood gets about, it's a big world. In that big world, he writes about last and first things, imagining his way into lives and times so often invisible to those who read poetry. The only cure for invisibility, after all, is being seen, and J. Tarwood aims to make us see.

J. TARWOOD has been a dishwasher, a community organizer, a medical archivist, an oral historian, a documentary film producer, and a teacher. After years in East Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East, he currently lives in China, and has published six books: The Cats in Zanzibar, Grand Detour, And For The Mouth A Flower, What The Waking See, The Sublime Way and The World At Hand. He has always been an unlikely man in unlikely places.

"There is a brutal beauty to J. Tarwood's poems. 'The language's mine,' he writes, and that language is terse, clear, hard, all excess excised: 'Road's clean as a bone.' Poems like 'The Haunting' and 'A Pause in Our Divorce' are among many fierce, revelatory takes on human experience, that 'long howl of harm.' If 'We are all doomed,' as many of these poems make clear we are, at least we have the artful magic found in work like this to console us." - Terence Winch, author of That Ship Has Sailed

"By now it's a commonplace that the cruel density of the family doesn't stand apart from the world. But how to experience the erasure of the boundary as if you are always at the crossing, never here nor there? Read these poems by J. Tarwood. In them you will find that the world elsewhere has found its home at last, in you and among these fathers and mothers, sisters and brothers, daughters and sons, everyone of them an exile in waiting. Here Ernesto says: 'At night there are men who open windows / to get on top of all the sadness in the world.' Tarwood prefers to write in character from beneath that happy surface, where an underground man belongs, but from the horizon he surveys you will nonetheless hear laughter." - James Livingston, author of Fuck Work