"I took the pill that shrinks you down. I gave the book the treatmentthat turns a book into a 3-dimensional self-contained universe within auniverse. I climbed in and began to walk around. It took me a while tocatch on. I was a little too busy being awe-struck by what I was finding.I was dazzled and struck blind every way I turned. The agencies of ourimaginations have to be tended. In The City from Nome we're challengedto tune ourselves up into haunted and strange high registers."-Dara Wier"OK, people, I have to be honest with you. James is just too humble.He didn't suddenly "get lucky" by having two manuscripts acceptedfor publication within six months of each other. No. Instead, the worldof poetry has finally caught on to his mad genius. And I don't use thatword lightly. I like to compare reading his poems to being draggedinto the ocean by your ankles. As if you are tethered to an enormousmanta ray that pulls you fathoms down. Yes. You're terrified, but youcan't help but notice all the eyeless flowering creatures along the way.You swerve, weightlessly, in between sea volcanoes and yes, you'll burnyour cheek or perhaps finger tips, but only because you must hurt, alittle, in the face of such beauty."-Kristin Bock"James Grinwis' The City From Nome opens with a man in a state ofindecision-a man just sitting there 'with a chandelier growing out ofhis head.' It might have you wondering. But as you move through thisbook you'll see it's all here: a colossus whispers something to a colossuspolisher; an ax handler laughs like a tongueless baby; a whole townhas tennis elbow. At one point the speaker of a poem falls over a coffeetable 'like an atonal finch, ' while another confesses he 'took breaks onthe floors of dark closets.' All the while an emotional frequency buzzesquietly-superbly-in the basement, which ices this cake nicely."-Michael Earl CraigJames Grinwis' second collection, Exhibit of Forking Paths, winner of The National Poetry Series, is forthcoming from Coffee House Press. He is founder of Bateau Press, and his poems have appeared in America Poetry Review, Conjunctions, Crazyhorse, Gettysburg Review, New Orleans Review, Third Coast, Verse Daily, and many others.