Experiencing Scott Poole's poems is like visiting inside the human brain. His words pulse with electric life, and carry the reader on a torrent of wonderful energy to encounter marvel after marvel. A narrator grows corn inside his garage, another person bounces basketballs off a Rodin sculpture, a man sticks his foot into a coal mine on a Spring day permitting hundreds of tiny miners to escape. A sensitivity quivering with the terror and joy of existence inhabits this poetry. A man temporarily abandons replacing a broken automobile starter to savor the perfection of babies." Another realizes that living beings posses a power such "that death / can't completely inhabit the body." Poole's words would convince anyone that our species will endure and triumph. Humorous, thoughtful, and vibrating with magic, the poems of Hiding from Salesmen are simultaneously vehicle, idea, organic compound and music. The future of poetry---hey, the future of humanity---is in good hands if it's in Scott Poole's hands." --Tom Wayman

WHY I LOVE MY GARAGE DOOR OPENER

I don't know if this is a cure
for dumbness,
but I decided to grow corn

in my garage.
I dug up the floor, hung
special lights and clicked
on an audio clip of crickets singing at dusk.
I painted the ceiling black
and stuck it with fluorescent stars.

Then I felt smart, sleeping
in-between the rows, dreaming
of Kansas. But when the cricket track changed
to a whale clip,

and I heard the sub-ocean groaning,
I felt dumb again under all that noisy grace.
But whales, I thought,
might dream of corn and that made me feel
smart and outrageously happy.

For hours I opened and closed
the garage door like the operator
behind the eye
of a great intelligent beast.