"These poems are hardscrabble-stark, but deeply wise." Former Oregon poet laureate Paulann Petersen on Casey Killingsworth's previous collection, A nest blew down.

We are all freaks, the way we dress, the way we conduct ourselves in grocery stores, the way we think about flowers. To everyone else we are inevitably odd and puzzling. In Freak Show Casey Killingsworth assembles poems outlining his own freakishness, the odd jobs and shifts that earned him his living, the difficulty trying to relate to other people, even how to love. Here he struggles to find a way to address a stranger on an elevator, to a duck walking in the middle of town, to how a bearded lady might address the world, even how history might work:

So how about this: what if all of history is contained in

some woman you barely know, say an older woman, say

one who checks your groceries out at the local market,

who worked at Subway every Saturday of her life but caught

a break when she got hired at the store and then got

promoted to manager...

what if all of history was defined in terms of her, everything that

ever was, and is, poured into a vessel the size of the person scanning

your cereal, hanging onto her every rotation around the earth?

What if?

from "The history of the world for as long as I can remember"

When you stitch all these poems together you will discover the shape of a poet just trying to understand something, anything, of the world.