ABOUT THIS BOOK

Charles Hood shows us a strange and perplexing world that runs on sadness, microbrews, snack cakes, and inexplicable magic. Brimming with natural history and bright flashes of language, his poems focus on transformations. He takes us from Paleolithic caves to modern movie theaters, and along the way we fix time machines with Tom Hanks, enter a Rousseau painting, and collect diamonds from the moons of Neptune.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Charles Hood is a writer of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction, a photographer, and an artist. His many books include Mouth; South x South; Río de Dios: 13 Histories of the Los Angeles River; The Half-Life of Salt: Voices of the Enola Gay; and Red Sky, Red Water: Powell on the Colorado. A longtime animal spotter, he has seen more than six hundred mammal species and more than five thousand species of wild birds. In his global travels, he has trekked to the South Pole, been lost in a Tibetan whiteout, and recovered from bubonic plague. He lives in Palmdale, California.

REVIEWS

"Simultaneously dazzling, playful, witty, goofy, hilarious, and profound, Partially Excited States carries us through our past into the present and even into our future somewhere in outer space. This is a mature book that manages to be idiosyncratic in its thinking but universal in its concerns." —Susan Mitchell

"These poems give us reality entire, ablaze with fires at once heavenly and infernal. This is a poet whose ecstasy and despair present two sides of the same blade, sharpened on a grim and gorgeous world." —Katharine Coles

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments
1. Invisible Terrain
                The Wand Chooses the Wizard
                How My Parents Died
                Bois de Boulogne
                The Invention of Punctuation
                State Insects
                Bow Hunting in Nevada
                All Males Die after Mating
                Landscape Is Just
                This Is Not an Ekphrastic Poem
                The Life of Jasper Johns
                Sargent Never Painted
                You’re Like This Girl in Lone Pine
                Pelt Vault, Natural History Museum
                Somewhere Near the Rental Car Counter
                Street Trees of San Francisco
                On the Island of the Not-So-Broken Poets
                Ikea
                Funeral Plans
                The Dictionary of Artists’ Models
                Magazine Tiger, Harper’s Bazaar
2. The History of Hell in America
                The History of Hell in America
3. Escape Velocity
                Sunrise on Mercury
                Getting Home without Tom Hanks
                The Earth as Seen from Earth
                Mars with Fear and Dread:
                                1. Phobos
                                2. Demos
                Another Thing That Happened
                Journal Entry on the Way to Jupiter and Saturn
                One of the Nicer Moons of Jupiter
                The History of Jupiter 4 (“Callisto”)
                Saturn Times Saturn Divided by Saturn
                Lassell of Bolton Discovers Triton
                Neptune 7 (“Larissa”)
                Voyager I Passes the Edge of the Solar System
Notes