Nice Fish: New and Selected Prose Poems

Jenkins is my favorite glove box poet. When I am dropping off or picking up a child and waiting in the car I like to have a poem to think about and Louis is my favorite. He is a rock star of the prose poem. I have all of this books and this is one of the best.

If you've never read Louis Jenkins this is a good place to start, well any of his books are a good place to start. This book contains selected poems from All Tangled Up In The Living and An Almost Human Gesture plus 16 new poems. The only thing that is a let down about this book is that the poems are so good that you'll want all his books. I had his first two books and then had to buy this one to get the new ones, but I already had the poems in the first two thirds of the book. Louis Jenkins has writer two books since this one which are not included here. The poems themselves treat the everyday as magical, without romanticizing it. His poems are often about imagery and decision. He takes the usually solid language of prose and makes it maluble. He changes his and your perspective so quickly, and so thoroughly that after one paragraph sized stanza you have a feeling of acomplishment, like you've been through something that you didn't think could be explained in words.