Shallow seas

'I feel ripped open,' Justin Quinn remarks in one of the poems in his new collection. A man in middle age may be a wreck, but before he turns into dust he may find ways to let the weirdnesses and passions of the world course through him. These poems celebrate intimacy both of rock and of flesh as Quinn riffs through geological time and sexual intensity. In their characteristically adroit formal patterns, they address historical and immediately contemporary situations. Their author talks with ghosts and they talk back. Another poem asks, 'What will the earth do with us?' The author sings some answers.