Surfaces is John Tipton's first full-length collection of poems. Here is a world of Cartesian precision, where matrices and Markov chains are revealed by the lattice of snowfall and the improbable order of ants. Yet the irrational and the absurd are not exiled from these poems, warping and defining their contours instead: "here the geography is the horizon here / Oklahoma moves him in ways he regrets . . ." "Each poem [in Surfaces ] is open enough, has enough compelling gaps for readers to work with, but at the same time the poems keep readers' connections on uncertain ground―each poem, with its variety of oral textures, images and arguments, presents possible challenges to the personal interpretation of any single reader. While I like the philosophical and lyrical compulsions of Surfaces , and, somewhat differently, the philosophical and lyrical concerns it enables me to address, I find that my understanding of what the book is about and my interpretations of it are constantly complicated and undercut. In the end, this troubled reading is what I want most from poems―something that I want to call beauty, but beauty that keeps me thinking and shifting."―Joel Bettridge, Jacket John Tipton was born in 1964 in Alton, Illinois. After an itinerant childhood―mostly in Indiana―and a stint in the army, he attended the University of Chicago, where he earned a degree in philosophy. He is the author of three poetry collections published by Flood Editions, Surfaces (2004), Paramnesia (2016), and Believers and Seven Sermons from the Bacchae (2022), as well as two translations of Greek tragedies: Sophocles' Ajax (2008) and Aeschylus's Seven against Thebes (2015), also published by Flood. He is the publisher of Verge Books, a small literary press he runs with Peter O'Leary. Since 1990 he has called Chicago home. Used Book in Good Condition