Whirligig

Poetry. "These poems contain a wonderful capacity to incorporate unpredictability, humor, anguish, anxiety, longing, and feisty note of confusion and survival...poems that are not wedded to literal and linear meaning of experience but to the imagined and circular meanings and play. WHIRLIGIG is consistently attentive to an edgy playfulness and serious mindfulness, continuing dialogue with matters of faith through failings of identity and belief in self and others. The poems carry the musical moment with an easy sensibility. The observations ripple and pause with seduction and sensuality" -- Jason Shinder, Founder of YMCA National Writers Voice and author of Among Women.

Make it new Pound said, and Christopher Salerno does, though the playfulness, wit and surprises in these poems remind me of the mid-career poets I most admire: Denise Duhamel, Tony Hoagland, Dean Young...We're alone in our best visions Salerno says but, as always, the best visions of the poet offer readers new ways of seeing. Whirligig is one of the most distinctive first books of poems I've read in decades. Ed Ochester, Editor, Pitt Poetry Series

Christopher Salerno's first book, "Whirligig," was published by Spuyten Duyvil Publishing House, 2006. Other poems can be found in Verse, The Colorado Review, Jubilat, Jacket, The Tiny, The New Hampshire Review, American Letters and Commentary, MiPOesias, Carolina Quarterly, Barrow Street, Free Verse, Lit, Forklift Ohio, Octopus, Coconut, The Laurel Review, and others. He teaches at North Carolina State University where he is co-curator of the So and So Reading Series and Poetry Editor for The Raleigh Quarterly. He was recently awarded the Independent Weekly Poetry Prize.