Up-and-coming poet Jamie Sharpe presents a finely tuned second collection

Cut-up Apologetic, Sharpe’s second collection, explores aging in a world where youth is terrible and something we desperately want back. These are poems about failing to leave our mark while marks are left on us — about the collective insatiability of emptying surroundings in an attempt to fill ourselves.

At the same time, Cut-up Apologetic is naïve and playful even when examining fear expressed as discrimination or the ways restlessness transitions into an inertia spelling cultural death. Sharpe finds strange new horizons “extend(ing)/only backward, into memory.”