J Tarwood

As an adult, I’ve worked in Kenya, Turkey, Yemen, Oman, Colombia, and Dubai; I’ve trekked by all sorts of dubious means through most of Africa, Europe, and South America, and I have been working for the last seven years in China.

But my life hasn’t been a travelogue. I’ve lived out globalization from aerograms to emails; that’s given me a vision quite different from many contemporary American poets.

I like what Rimbaud said: “’I’ is an other.”  

Norman Dubie praised my work, saying at times it was "a little like discovering an erect and hooded cobra in a petting zoo."  Philip St. Clair said I had superb ear, an unerring sense of pacing and compression, and striking and surprising images and tropes. He described me as "A long-time world traveler and expatriate, he brings uncommon wisdom and spirituality to his work: like the Jesus in one of his poems, he's ''made damn sure/he was never more/ than just passing through."

My books are The Cats in Zanzibar, Grand Detour, And For The Mouth A Flower, What The Waking See, The Sublime Way, and The World At Hand.  Most are available on Amazon.