A Few Bruises Better by Kevin Hinkle

Hinkle’s background as a visual artist shows throughout this vibrant poetry debut. He shifts, he highlights, he brings our attention to both the outer world and the self, and how we identify, re-identify, and question identities that were forced on us throughout the stages of our lives. These poems are firmly rooted in blood and the body, but also have a dry humor that quietly asks the reader to think again about what they’ve just read. While one of Hinkle’s poems says, “I can’t bear mirrors and self-contemplation,” his first collection offers us a gorgeous reflection of both human pain and hope.

–Telaina Eriksen, author of Unconditional, Amazon.com bestseller and winner of the 2018 Bisexual Book Award for Nonfiction

In A few Bruises Better, Kevin Hinkle contemplates the unreliability of the body, its many betrayals, in poems spoken in a voice both frank and gently wry. The speaker in one poems says, “I take pains not to reveal/ that my weakness is being weak,” yet these poems don’t shy from revealing themselves. The speaker’s frustration with his disobedient body parts is sometimes spoken as a wish, as in these lines from “Symptoms”: “I want my feet/ to be my feet /— to have a say/ in where they go” and other times as a more specific fear: “Brittle grass, and I am haunted by the thought of breaking bones.” Despite this ailing body, the disobedient body parts, the voice is not weary or hopeless, but rather contemplative, knowing, and lightly humorous. This is a book that will stay with me for its lovely musicality, which is in itself a kind of joyfulness.

–Rebecca Aronson, Author of Ghost Child of the Atalanta Bloom, winner of the Orison Books poetry prize, finalist for the NM/AZ Book Award in Poetry, and winner of the Albuquerque Museum Foundation’s Margaret Randall Book Award, and Creature, Creature, winner of the Main-Traveled Roads Press poetry prize.