Skirmish: Poems - Softcover

"In figures as elaborate and beautiful as frost, Dobby Gibson reinvents poetic argument, often as surprised and delighted by its own wild and energetic means as it is by its wild and sometimes mordant conclusions." --Dean Young on Polar

"I have read few more quotable first books . . . Polar is friendly, yearning, observant, immediately winning and witty." --The Yale Review on Polar

New poetry by Dobby Gibson, author of Polar, which "teems with a language so alive and so imaginative that one cannot help but read on with wonder and rapture" (The Bloomsbury Review)

We have to escape while we can.

I'm trying to remember you--quick,

now you try to remember me.

--from "Refuge"

With sheer wit and keen observation, Dobby Gibson's Skirmish puts into conflict the private and public self, civil disobedience and civic engagement, fortunes told and fortunes made. These poems imaginatively, sometimes manically, move from perception to perception with the speed of a mind forced moment by moment to make sense of distant war and local unrest, global misjudgment and suspicious next-door neighbors, the splice-cuts of the media and the gliding leaves on the Mississippi River.