Pressure Dressing

Pressure Dressing leaves us wondering where and how deeply are we wounded. In these poems, most especially in the extraordinary title suite, we are kept distracted from our own pain by the poet’s talk, his brilliant counterpoint of realities, his interleaving of lives, lived or glimpsed, his words alert to humiliation, to hurt, to beauty, to ideas, to others, and above all, to the transfiguring detail. With virtuosic turns of tone Mark Scroggins sounds out a complex affection for the flesh, telling with no slight elegance the ways we are bound to it, in it, and by it, and the grief we feel at the last farewell.

—Joseph Donahue