Road Rash

Road Rash is a brilliant blend of personal exploration and eco-poetics. Dardis ties the complications of human activity in the natural world to his own quest to reinvent his identity as an athlete and an artist. Moments of clarity and hope are tainted with incontrovertible artifacts of failure. All animals, human and wild, exist in an environment that is running out of free space. The downy white of the pelican feathers floats on the same waters as the industrial white of the Styrofoam container holding a dozen night crawlers. What we hope will survive becomes entangled with the things we’ve created and can’t get rid of. The world and its wanderers wear “an archipelago of scars.”

Through an exacting, ravaged, and sometimes sad eye, Tim Dardis . . . corrugates the daily news, the daily muse, the desire to snooze . . . Road Rash shines with both the abrasions on our skin and the larger scarred body we roll upon. Near and far, hazards happen daily; the commute invades our dreams. In the ecological mayhem of the teens, there's something stable in Dardis' seat: "A resting place/but not a rest/stop for the traffic/of this world." ----Matthew Cooperman

ROAD RASH unfolds like a long, winding highway, and crosses all of the dotted lines: here the verse is clinical, there it is atmospheric (and still elsewhere bellicose, domestic, erotic). It is nowhere not intense. Let the reader beware, here lie wounded poems that will not fail to wound in turn. ----Timothy Snediker