Cinema Vernacular
by Peter Nickowitz

Cinema Vernacular is a stunning new collection of poetry by Peter Nickowitz. Using forms like screenplays and even films in his poetics, Cinema Vernacular is porous, deft, concerned with our relationship to the intangible and how desire filters through image and text. Mark Doty writes, 'Ironic and vulnerable, full of longing but savvily independent, the speaker in Nickowitz's poems is a recognizable, alert, 21st century citizen, sustained and flummoxed by desire.' These poems mark, with recognizable pathos and sharp turns of hilarity, the arrival of a major voice.