door of thin skins

A hybrid of poetry, prose, and visual elements, door of thin skins is a tale that unfolds in a psychotherapist's and a state prosecutor's office and the mind of the poet regarding it all–

door of thin skins deconstructs the nature of psychological power through a reconstruction akin to a psychological diorama. The book's events, narrated by a young woman in psychotherapy, unfold in non-chronological sequence, and recurring phrases, images, and events unify and deepen the narrative whose formal construction mirrors the process of psychotherapy. As a patient-therapist relationship becomes dependent and sexual, resulting in a precarious blurring of boundaries, the text alternates between the straightforward and syntactically disjunctive. Visual poems contribute another layer towards enacting one of the book's themes, a fracturing of the narrator's sight and simultaneous and conflicting perceptions of reality. The book's formal experimentation echoes and challenges Wittgenstein's "the limits of my language mean the limits of my world." In addition to its innovative poetics, this book, first published in 2013, is among the predecessors of the #MeToo movement's voice.

door of thin skins has been favorably reviewed in many venues including American Book Review, Rain Taxi, Georgia Review, The Rumpus, Rattle, Cutbank, Diagram, OmniVerse, American Literary Review, HTML Giant, Tarpaulin Sky, Denver Quarterly, and Fourth Genre.