James Stinks (and So Does Chuck)

Book excerpt: Don't bother reading this book, but please do buy it. If you own it you don't need to read it, and you'll help stop my publisher going broke. Also, you'll be supporting poetry, which is a Good Thing. - Nick RiemerThis vividly varied collection, experimental and assured, is located at the nexus of seeing and saying. Some of the poems are magical verbal mobiles, some probe philosophical imponderables and the limits and resistances of language itself, others, with deft humour, reinterpret history and landscape. The best first book of poems I have read for years. - Vivian SmithNick Riemer's book is destabilizing, self-mocking and periodically nihilistic. The imagery is crystalline, the explorations of the inanimate paradoxically animated and lively. If words were kites Nick Riemer's could take you places you'd not imagine words could go. - J. S. HarryPlaced third in the Mary Gilmore Award, 2006