Dennis Hinrichsen is the author of twelve full-length collections of poetry. Formally adroit and lyrically rich, his poems unerringly map both the zeitgeist and the subjective psyche. His recent books include Dominion + Selected Poems, Flesh-plastique, and schema geometrica, winner of the Wishing Jewel Prize for poetic innovation, and This Is Where I Live I Have Nowhere Else To Go, winner of the Grid Poetry Prize. His other awards include the Field Poetry Prize, the Michael Waters Poetry Prize, the Tampa Poetry Prize, the Akron Poetry Prize, and the Rachel Wetzsteon Chapbook Award. He lives in Michigan, where he served as the first Poet Laureate of the Greater Lansing area.

Praise for dementia lyrics

The scattered scintillations of the poems in dementia lyrics convey related laments—for two friends diminished and finally felled by dementia, but also for the poisoned rivers and wounded cities the poet isn't alone in experiencing. Tough-minded, tender, gritty, visionary—the voice of this book is all these. Hinrichsen's work is the utterance of a loyal friend and a candid witness whose poems, however unsparing, leave room for humanity and hope. —Rachel Hadas

In Hinrichsen’s dementia lyrics, lines break like fragments of memory and movement as the poet explores the city of dementia, two friends—one gone and another deteriorating into “muscular forgetting— / last / night’s rain the accelerant / pushing / at the near edge.” With a lyricism akin to the progressions of Miles and W. S. Merwin’s grief amidst a dying planet, Hinrichsen astonishes in his diagnosis of scene, each image a synapse: “(cartons of milk on a tray) / (cookies on a plate) / (one bruised apple).” Step inside the poet’s city of Lansing, alive with homeless hunger and the fight for clean water. Witness the poet’s interiority in his tender caregiving, the friend who “wants / to know how it is / he knows / me :: whatever constellation / of neurons / I am to him / dead-sky locked :: / as for emotion :: it is mine ::” To turn a page is to step into the lyric: “his death / in my / hand in his / my living / grip.” Hinrichsen is a compassionate luminary at the top of his craft. —Janine Certo

• Two poems from dementia lyrics

• One poem from Action, Spectacle