The poems in Mars Poetica examine the conscious and unconscious ways we comprehend both the world around us and the one inside.

Contents
"
Mars Poetica "
"
The Kind of Rain 8
This Lightness
Plaza de Toros
Viral
Movement
Lifeboat
This Train
The Next New Thing 15
Rosemary¿s Babies 16
Angels
My Idea
What I Might Have Done 19

II

How Silent the Trees 21
Hurricane
Pity
Quake
Pulse
Drummer
Sort it Out
Mixup at the Speakeasy 28
Her Measured Fall 29
Gravity
Counting
The Loneliest Road in America 32

III

Collected Works 34
Needles and Haste 35
Vectors
Gunfire
Intense
Death of the Cool 39
Tread Lightly
Harvest Moon
Trapped in a Decade Long Gone 42
She Erased His Mouth 43
Alaska
Pirated
Debris

IV

Abstraction
Drinking the Stars 49
Menu
Parade
Three Loves
Flow
Belief
The Watcher
Documents
Film
Starboard
The Road Ends Here 59

Acknowledgments 60
Thank You
About the Author 62

Wyn Cooper has published four previous books of poetry, most recently Chaos is the New Calm (BOA Editions, 2010). His poems, stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, AGNI, The Southern Review, Five Points, Slate, and more than 100 other magazines. His poems are included in 25 anthologies of contemporary poetry, including Poetry: An Introduction, The Mercury Reader, Outsiders, and Ecstatic Occasions, Expedient Forms.
In 1993, ¿Fun,¿ a poem from his first book, was turned into Sheryl Crow¿s Grammy-winning song ¿All I Wanna Do.¿ He has also cowritten songs with David Broza, David Baerwald, Jody Redhage, and Bill Bottrell. In 2003, Gaff Music released Forty Words for Fear, a CD of songs based on poems and lyrics by Cooper, set to music and sung by the novelist Madison Smartt Bell. Their second CD, Postcards Out of the Blue, based in part on Cooper¿s postcard poems, was released in 2008. Their songs have been featured on six television shows.
Cooper has taught at the University of Utah, Bennington College, Marlboro College, and at The Frost Place. He has given readings across the country, as well as in Europe. He is a former editor of Quarterly West, and the recipient of a fellowship from the Ucross Foundation. For two years he worked at the Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute, a think tank run by the Poetry Foundation, and now serves on the Writers Advisory Board of the Nantucket Book Festival. He lives in Boston and works as a freelance editor.
www.wyncooper.com