How To Tie & Untie Mist

On the surface, How To Tie & Untie Mist seems to pick up where Hales' previous book, C mo Hacer Preguntas? or How To Make Questions: 69 Instructional Poems in English, left off. But these new poems aren't a continuation so much as a deeper dive into the questions and shifting answers we generate to manufacture meaning. This new exploded annex of poetry goes further, deeper, wilder, weirder, once more into the breach, "explaining" everything from how to tie a tie, get a job promotion, resign from your job, pray, find redemption, grieve, approach swans, die, and make a sandwich.

The book's third section deconstructs selected poems in the previous two sections through partial erasures: new skeletal poems emerge from the mist to contradict the original poems--or to untie their knots, revealing their essence. How To Tie & Untie Mist explores the ordinary and the miraculous, the past, the future, and the mist shrouding our present moment, including the current administration's attempts to re-name the visible world and erase history.