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Despite his darkly comedic strain, Borkhuis’ voice in these poems is sincere and singular. Throughout his work over decades, all of Borkhuis’ poems want to know something that cannot be known. The frenzied epistemological tenacity is unmistakably Borkhuis. The poems are tireless, unafraid, and honest in their grief for the loss of self, identity, intimacy, home--all of which is echoed in the burlesque parodies of each poem’s fierce quest, each poem tirelessly thrown across the nothing that keeps everything afloat. “A missing body / over an empty grave.” Although the voices are carnivalesque, the poems are in concert; they play a darkly minor musical key of life as “a replay of coming attractions.” Borkhuis’ ironies and Brechtian alienation effects are a constant; they lift this work into the register of the tragic-comic. This book is exceptional in its philosophic energy, in its highly original appropriations of the noir genre (a signature trait), and most deeply in its unflinching refusal to be consoled—unless it were by the writing of poetry.
—Harold Schweizer, Ph.D., Professor of English, Emeritus, Bucknell University
Charles Borkhuis is a pioneering poet who creates works of singular poetic depth mapping the uncanny, conjuring otherworldly beauty, poignant struggle, sentient being – “your double buzzes / with becoming” – time and space tenderly turned outside in. On every page of Skin in the Game, “one’s eyes close / between the letters… / and another steps through.” And the one taking dictation? “Who would you be / without me.”
—Andrew Levy, Artifice in the Calm Damages
One of the recurring themes in Charles Borkhuis’ writings is the speed at which machines are replacing humans. What remains when the human self begins to disappear? Experience becomes “a simulated reality,” “the demise of the real.” The poems in Skin in the Game respond to this predicament and its myriad implications with hypnotic intensity.
—Michael Ruby, Close Your Eyes, Visions
In Borkhuis’ world, the self is a poem you write by day but your eyelids, laden by Late Capitalism, erase by night. Upon awakening, the cycle repeats. It’s a lot of pressure to recreate yourself every day--no wonder “a hiss of steam escapes between the last word and the next.” This hiss is the impersonal techno-marketplace’s angry jonesing for a personhood fix. It needs us to manifest itself. The night is that same data-collecting web’s absolute indifference to any actual person. No wonder each poem in this book is laid out like brickwork, one utterance (felt or found, it doesn’t matter) laid on top of another. We need walls to live in, if only temporarily. Skin in the Game provides this skin, those improvised walls.
—Joe Elliot, An Everything
Charles Borkhuis, poet, playwright, screenwriter, and essayist, received an MA in English from San Francisco State University and has taught at Hofstra University and Touro College. His 12 collections of poems include Spontaneous Combustion (Winner of the 2021 International James Tate Prize for Poetry) and Alpha Ruins, selected by Fanny Howe as a finalist for the William Carlos Williams Book Award. His poems have appeared in 8 anthologies including the Dia Anthology: Readings in Contemporary Poetry 2010-2016. His two essays on contemporary poetics appeared in the books Telling it Slant and We Who Love to Be Astonished. He curated poetry readings for the Segue Foundation in NYC for 15 years. His translations include New Exercises from the French by Franck André Jamme. His work has appeared in numerous magazines and journals including: Jacket 2, Brooklyn Rail, Marsh Hawk, Posit, BlazeVOX, American Letters and Commentary, Avec, New American Writing, o.blek, Verse, The World, and Local Knowledge. His plays have been produced in NYC, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Hartford, San Diego and Paris. His two radio plays The Sound of Fear Clapping and Foreign Bodies were produced by National Public Radio. He is the recipient of a Drama-logue Award and the former editor of Theater:EX magazine. His play Blue Period about Young Picasso in Paris was selected by the Times of San Diego as one of the ten best plays presented in San Diego in 2022. Born and raised in NYC, he currently lives in San Diego with his partner Kathleen Page.
Book Information:
· Paperback: 144 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-544-1
$22
