Christopher Stackhouse is the author of poetry collected in the chapbook Slip (Corollary Press, 2005); co-author of Seismosis (1913 Press 2006), a collaboration featuring Stackhouse's drawings and John Keene's text. He holds an MFA from Bard College; is a Cave Canem Writers Fellow; and is a 2005 Fellow in Poetry, New York Foundation for the Arts. His recent essays have been published in the literary journal American Poet, and the anthology A Best of Fence: The First Nine Years. He will be a guest faculty member in the Naropa University Summer Writing Program 2009, at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in Boulder, Colorado. Currently completing a manuscript of poetry, while also doing research for the development of a non-fiction book on poetics, Stackhouse lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

 (“The Nose” or “Boats”)

intellect plays in the nose, rarefied, undecorated
primer, not quite a brown rat –  with all plainness the idea
making things crank antiphonic, anticipates boats –
that ting in ear might be tinnitus or buzz of endless talk –
gaslit, a disconnected kiss, anthracitic distillate to weigh against
animation, so cold its hot white, at the bottom of the flame, clear
there is dead and there is this afloat – for one chance at this
thick warp, variation yields to force –

Wet

a smattering of paint here and there, because
“paint” is old, because the “contents of painting” are
everywhere- and this stasis does it, keeps time that way
flesh re-doubles in minutes, in fission, an endless
beginning there of “forever wet”, forever contemplating
what’s left, what’s leaving, asks the impossible what –
to penetrate yourself in the blackest dark –
to conjure something happy for you, but unfamiliar