Scar Tissue: Poems

In Scar Tissue, the Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Charles Wright not only investigates the tenuous relationship between description and actuality―"A thing is not an image"―but also reaffirms the project of attempting to describe, to capture the natural world and the beings in it, although he reminds us that landscape is not his subject matter but his technique: that language was always his subject―language and "the ghost of god." And in the dolomites, the clouds, stars, wind, and water that populate these poems, "something un-ordinary persists."

Scar Tissue is a groundbreaking work from a poet who "illuminates and exalts in the entire astonishing spectrum of existence" (Booklist).