Others is a book about travel through landscapes, from Route 80 twining through Pennsylvania and New Jersey to Coney Island to Chicago’s Wabash Avenue, to the N Train in Queens.  Deeply personal, yet deeply connected to the outside world, and, at its heart, elegiac, John Reid Currie’s collection spins on the axis of self and other, text and image, separation and connection.   Currie writes, “It’s all over my family; death makes the best argument.” And yet in this book life wins out:  the life of the mind, the life of the place.  These poems are about the opposite of escape—this is a collection about holding, embracing, and transforming. 

                  —  Nicole Cooley, Author of Resurrection, The Afflicted Girls, and Breach