Bare Skinned

"Bare Skinned: A Collection" is a distinctive and colorful medley of poetry and prose that is strikingly original, blatantly raw, and daringly honest-leaving nothing but the unrefined necessities sprawled across the page.

In "Be Kind: Please Rewind," a young man flees from a club into the night, away from his vengeful, betrayed, and pregnant girlfriend who intends to kill him. A lake beast stalks Oklahoma cows as a doped-up waitress rests unaware in a nearby cabin in "Oklahoma Is the Only Word I Know In That Song." A boy transported to the Dead world in "Marching with the Dead" fears acclimation to food and sexual encounters of the dead, which may permanently transform him into one of their kind. A young man has an emotional breakdown in the drive-thru of the Chicken King, cradling dead chicken chunks in an upright fetal position in "Invisibles Academy."

Perpetually lost in their own thoughts, most of the off-kilter characters in "Bare Skinned" are engrossed in a weariness of the world that seems to be sinking away beneath them. They want love and reason-an escape that could reunite the fragmented pieces of their existences.