Flesh-plastique, Dennis Hinrichsen’s tenth full-length collection, explores an array of debris fields, where we experience the repercussions of a life fueled by dirty, secular Eucharists. Moving at hyper speed through worlds—a compromising job in the nuclear industry, the purloined grave of the Apache chief Geronimo (not far from Atomic Annie, a cannon that could shoot a nuclear projectile)—Hinrichsen articulates each scene with a swift directness and capacious emotional range. In collages and atmospheric lyrics with stunning formal collisions, we hear anger and humor directed at the mess we have made of things, from the unsolved problems of nuclear waste and toxic forever-chemicals to the decay of the American family. But we also hear joy for the sheer pleasure of music and old technologies; we hear compassion for friends stricken with dementia; and ultimately, we hear notes of hopefulness for a world which swirls wildly and dangerously around us.

Praise for Flesh-plastique

In a nuclear age without a nucleus to cling to, the poems of Dennis Hinrichsen’s Flesh-plastique flit and careen across time and space, both dexterously and dangerously—grieving, grooving, lusting, waiting—and showing us how to live—fully live!—between an unsettled past and an uneasy future: “I too am cut with Eros and toxicity—fearing death—by isotope and viral load—but still pursuing nakedness.” A searing, audacious, deliberative book.

—Lauren Russell

In Flesh-plastique, Dennis Hinrichsen is once again, and even more vigorously, a formal genius, every page engineered into a canvas of airborne lines, charted space, and radical gifts of punctuation that feel like symbols and stamps—sometimes even scars. His words throughout gleam intensely personal and political, often at the same time: wounded lands of heart and world. Sometimes they are not easy words or comfortable or cozy words, but they are honest and longing—absolutely human in their undisguised vulnerability.

—Maureen Seaton

From Flesh-plastique

• Three poems from Under a Warm Green Linden, Issue 13

• Three poems from On the Seawall

• “[Flesh-plastique]” from The West Review

Dennis Hinrichsen is the winner of the inaugural Wishing Jewel Prize! Named for an innovative essay in Anne Carson’s Plainwater, the prize is awarded for a manuscript that challenges our notions of what poems can do and what a book can be. schema geometrica, Hinrichsen’s ninth full-length collection is nothing short of visionary. It juxtaposes quasi-sonnets and erasures with illustrations by Marnie Galloway, a Chicago-area cartoonist and illustrator, and Julian Van Dyke, a Lansing-area muralist, painter, and children’s book author. schema geometrica will be accompanied by a number of audio and video poems, available online this fall; this is a multimedia collaboration between Hinrichsen and Dylan Rogers, a Lansing-area musician and proprietor of The Robin Theatre, and Tom Larter, musician and composer.

Praise for schema geometrica

Some of us are content to rearrange the furniture. Dennis Hinrichsen has dismantled the walls, attached a wheelbase to the flooring, and reconfigured the power lines. And wait, I think he has levitated the shrubbery too. But fear not. Page by page and image by image, he leads us through the time- and memory-altering adventure that is schema geometrica. The poems are wild and rigorous at once, joyful and irreverent, abundant with intellect, and sometimes, yes, driven by rage at the wreckage we have made around us. This is not a comfortable couch of a lyric vision. This is lyric determined to imagine a future, and I admire it deeply.

—Linda Gregerson

schema geometrica is a “box of light” whittled from a life marred by darkness. Biblical ekphrasis & Daft Punk, Godzilla & gonorrhea, an extinct paddlefish & an Instagram model’s bodily brand of philanthropy—there are no subjects Dennis Hinrichsen can’t juxtapose & wield like a gilded mirror to orient the self in this confounding era. Lyrically dexterous, formally inventive, & humming with vulnerable surprise, schema geometrica is the work of a master poet.

—Marcus Wicker

From schema geometrica

• “[POEM THAT ENDS UP ON ITS KNEES IN CHINA IN A PAIR OF LEVI'S]," Under a Warm Green Linden

• "[I TEXT MY FATHER IN THE AFTERLIFE & HE DOES NOT RESPOND] [W/BECKETT ECHO]," Tinderbox Poetry Journal

• “[BOX OF SOUND W/ SOME FUNK IN IT],” The Night Heron Barks

• “[schema geometrica] [W/ RAINER MARIA RILKE] [& A TUK TUK] [& A DOG],” The Maine Review

Praise for [q / lear]

As I watch these short films, these poems, unfold // frame by frame // like so many stunning still shots passing, I know the poet-musician-photographer-filmmaker at work here, Dennis Hinrichsen, is pointing his heart’s camera at all the guts and ordinary glory of light, at the bleeding surfaces of our ordinary lives as did Sally Mann, whose photos are reference for some of these poems—(“tincture of Vicks on a pillowcase // pile of week old clothes in a heap”). But, like Mann, Hinrichsen transforms the banal and brutal into beauty, “the squeaking chains into birdsong,” in this chapbook built as a five-act haunting narrative, in which Q, the mother and heart of this play, sees the world, like King Lear, through an ever more splintered lens. A poet ever marking new territory, Hinrichsen turns heartbreak into hymn, and shows us again why he is one of our sharpest poets of the moment.

—Robert Fanning

Part Madmen, part King Lear, part Whitman, all fractal, the poems in [q /lear] play with prosody, family mythos, and the notion of America and motherhood during the culturally-shifting sixties. In the character of Q we have mother/housewife/woman-who-desires-for-more, and Hinrichsen brings to life her struggles with pathos and in a formal way that reflects her own challenges. So many times I returned to these pages, haunted by the beautifully and brutally honest lines. Hinrichsen takes risks but never alienates the reader because the voice in these poems is intimate and inviting, even as the form of the poems and book challenges us. These are poems for the age, engaging the questions of identity and desire and changing mores and challenging our expectations without wanting to leave anyone behind. About these poems, perhaps it is best put this way:

it bubbles out // this music //
pure abandon
—a burned
mouth kissing burned earth // shape of fire just before the singing

—Gerry LaFemina

[q/lear] concerns itself with the big issues of mortality and madness—like the play it uses as a backdrop. While some of these poems refer to bodies in decay, the poems themselves build, accrete, and pulse with Hinrichsen’s trademark restlessness and energy. As a great poet of the soul as well as the flesh, Hinrichsen explores the primordial dance between the human spirit and our vulnerable bodies while making us experience it anew.

—Sue William Silverman

Four poems from [q / lear] in Under a Warm Green Linden, Issue 5