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 Davis 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

What is poetry for? On a dying planet, in a time of persistent, overwhelming grief— personal, ecological, political—what can poetry possibly offer us? As he travels from the bedsides of his dying friends to the drought-ravaged fields of Western Kansas, Dennis Hinrichsen asks these questions. Asks them insistently, obsessively. Not because he expects an answer; he knows, as he writes here, “destruction of the lyric by the / lyric / will not save us.” But because it is the asking that makes poetry worthwhile: it allows us to hold our grief as long as we can, to experience, “that / ontological rush” which is life itself, and which might otherwise slip away, unsung and unmourned. What is poetry for? Dementia lyrics will make you ask the question again, anew, refreshed in the power of all that can still be said. —Toby Altman

• Two poems from dementia lyrics

• One poem from Action, Spectacle

Praise for Dominion + Selected Poems

Dennis Hinrichsen is an astute observer of the world, lending the full force of his senses to the task, rendering surfaces and probing its substrata with immaculate lyricism. He is also gifted with a revelatory inward eye, probing memory’s darker caves and the grim future of our planet with equal precision and devotion. Dominion + Selected Poems is a treasure trove of his most poignant poems and a record of a poetic conscience at its most elevated and elevating. —Khaled Mattawa

The four-decade trajectory of Dennis Hinrichsen’s poetry epitomizes a classic American version of aesthetic self-fashioning and refashioning. Every style Hinrichsen creates he then breaks and remakes. In this way, he has recapitulated, more than once, the great changes undertaken by major postwar poets like Merwin, Rich, and Wright. I’ve followed his impatient art through its every decade, in recent years quickening my pace to keep up. Few poets write with greater imaginative restlessness (even as the heart holds steady), and no poet more deserves a retrospective of this sort. —Steven Cramer

One thing that makes these poems extraordinary, and there are many, is the way they give us multiple surprising routes deep into the familiar. The conduit is richly metaphoric language that’s passionate, intimate, inventive, unafraid of what it might discover, and clear. What mysteries, the poems ask, underlie our ordinary emotions, memories, inquiries of mind? Each poem answers that question with meticulous precision, mapping out the ways the extraordinary, numinous, sometimes ruined world is right here, if only we know where to look. And we must look, say the poems, because the mysteries of our lives turn out to be the meaning of our lives. —Chase Twichell

Bringing a museum to his poems—a confluence of architectural, harmonic, atonal, geometric, choreographic, photographic, subatomic, incongruously new and enlivened experiences—Dennis Hinrichsen welcomes our participation in the power of ambiguity. For this writer, everything belongs with everything, and anything belongs with anything. Dominion + Selected Poems reveals the span of his astonishing vision, a vision that leads me into awe. —Jack Ridl

I had already read and loved the books from which the selected poems in Dominion were taken, but I have to say: the marvel of so many great Hinrichsen poems under a single cover announces his mastery in no uncertain manner. Hinrichsen’s language—his command of image and metaphor—possesses a power to perform a sort of transubstantiation, by which the ordinary we might see or experience becomes a wholly new substance, real in a different way, formally inventive, further fleshed out, and, in many cases, delightfully stranger. —Justin Hamm

“Was there any spirit in it?” asks Dennis Hinrichsen in Dominion + Selected Poems, and his poems respond kaleidoscopically. It’s been a gift to read my way across the expanse of this dominion, this keen curation of poems that “must have / wept as they bled as they sang” across decades of Hinrichsen’s work and the turn of the millennium. Wheeling through this poetry, I feel myself drawn to its commitment to the radical—both deeply rooted and daringly extreme. There’s a “current in it like a corkscrew,” a wandering yet patterned musical buzz like “low wattage radio pitching doo wop-vascular-static / to the dark.” Book after book, Hinrichsen has “polished the shock” of language so that we might bear witness to its strange gleam. But his dynamic lexicon goes well beyond language play. It’s always tugging at the seams between the mundane and the holy. Hinrichsen’s poems are deft variegations, in turns wondering in earnest then questioning askance the possibilities of mercy, of regret, of death, of working among the living. The poet won’t let us forget the “abyss is always leaking,” but after reading Dominion I can’t help but agree that, yes: “there is—I think—still time for this.” —Aaron Coleman

• Two poems from Under a Warm Green Linden, Issue 16

• One poem from ballast

• One poem from Timber

• A review of Dominion + Selected Poems (The Lake)

• An interview about Dominion + Selected Poems (ballast)