Snake Skin: Poems

In Snake Skin, Kurt Olson maps the rivers, wheat fields, mill towns, back roads, and stubborn longings of the inland Northwest. These poems move between the Snake River and the Palouse, Moscow and Spokane, tracing the complicated pull of places we flee but never entirely leave behind. Along the way, Olson writes with tenderness and unsparing wit about working-class life, restless youth, love, family, and the illness and death of a mother. Chainsaws dream, cities drink and weep, memory clings like a fishhook, and a familiar recipe becomes an impossible act of mourning. Gritty, musical, and darkly funny, Snake Skin is a book about the selves we shed and the selves that follow us-about leaving home, returning in memory, and learning to inhabit the tender new skin beneath.