How To Tie & Untie Mist
Daniel Hales
How To Tie & Untie Mist
Price: $14.00 pbk. Literature, Poetry 6x9; 73 p. ISBN: 9781642510638 (pbk.) Publicaiton Date: May 13, 2025 "Columbine used to be the name of a flower. The red, blue, & white starred flag used to be a symbol that represented the United States of America. My pick for Civil War/zombie apocalypse stronghold is the big blue house on Colrain with turrets, stockade fencing, & a gully on three sides we could fill with with spikes & fire...."
--from "How To Give It A Name, 3" |
"Daniel Hales has written a brilliant page-turner! "Let's erode & sell / our wisdom teeth to Alchemy," the poet suggests between swan warnings and mice eating the candles on his porch. By the time you reach "How To Be Mist," you will want to begin reading these poems over the phone. Call your lover and your friends, and don't forget to call your mother! I love this book!"
--CAConrad, author of Listen to the Golden Boomerang Return On the surface, How To Tie & Untie Mist seems to pick up where Hales' previous book, ¿Cómo Hacer Preguntas? or How To Make Questions: 69 Instructional Poems in English, left off. But these new poems aren't a continuation so much as a deeper dive into the questions and shifting answers we generate to manufacture meaning. This new exploded annex of poetry goes further, deeper, wilder, weirder, once more into the breach, "explaining" everything from how to tie a tie, get a job promotion, resign from your job, pray, find redemption, grieve, approach swans, die, and make a sandwich.
The book's third section deconstructs selected poems in the previous two sections through partial erasures: new skeletal poems emerge from the mist to contradict the original poems--or to untie their knots, revealing their essence. How To Tie & Untie Mist explores the ordinary and the miraculous, the past, the future, and the mist shrouding our present moment, including the current administration's attempts to re-name the visible world and erase history. 
Daniel Hales is the author of the hybrid novel Run Story (Shape&Nature Press), the poetry collection ¿Cómo Hacer Preguntas? or How To Make Questions: 69 Instructional Poems In English (Frayed Edge), & three poetry chapbooks: Shake My Ashes (Beard of Bees), Blind Drive (White Knuckle), & Tempo Maps (Ixnay). His writing has appeared in Booth, Conduit, The Massachusetts Review, Quarter After Eight, & elsewhere. He makes music as Umbral, The Ambiguities, & Selah haleS. The most recent album by his band, The Frost Heaves & Hales, is Ghost Of A Chance To The Shadow Of A Doubt. His preferred place of worship is a kayak. His sensei is The Cat Of Many Names.
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