Charles Rafferty is the author of 15 poetry books and chapbooks. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, O: Oprah Magazine, The Southern Review, Gettysburg Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. He lives in Sandy Hook, CT.

“Prose poems?—technically, yes. But really these are a new kind of physics: compact poems that, by virtue of their savvy soulful synapse-sparking swift connections, are larger on the inside than they are on the surface. They comment on our world with witty insight, and yet are themselves an imaginative world of a higher order. If Alice had entered such a wonderland of sharp thought and true tidings, she’d have never tried to leave.” —Albert Goldbarth, two-time recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award “In The Appendectomy Grin Charles Rafferty’s irrefutable voice meditates on ideas, nature, relationships, as well as things—how they start and the uncanny ways they are shaped in the end. These prose poems are full of hope even as they upend American culture. Often wry, and always surprising, Rafferty makes you reconsider everything you thought was true.” —Suzanne Frischkorn, author of Whipsaw