The poems of this universal expat capture our foibles and follies yet somehow make us care about people like Filipinos trapped in Arabia or the kid who desperately wants to be part of the in-crowd but never will.

 

J. TARWOOD has been a dishwasher a community organizer a medical archivist a documentary film producer an oral historian and a teacher. Much of his life has been spent in East Africa Latin America and the Middle East. He has published two previous books The Cats In Zanzibar and Grand Detour. He has always been an unlikely man in unlikely places.

"[WHAT THE WAKING SEE] takes you inside so many people and places in the world in way no other poet that I know can. This is a priceless book." --Bradley R. Strahan Director of Visions International Arts

"There are beautiful poems here-though on occasion the brilliant imagery of this large ambitious collection. . .[is] a little like discovering an erect and hooded cobra in a petting zoo." --Norman Dubie author of The Quotations of Bone and The Volcano