With a title like The Air is Smokey Because We Don't Love Each Other Enough, it's no surprise that these poems deal candidly and unapologetically with the conundrum of living in our times (and I love it). Dark humor looms in Gusta's lines, and you'll find that you may recognize your friends, your lovers, and yourself in the attitudes and anecdotes that inhabit these pages. Intriguing, clever, and achingly relevant, this collection is essential reading for everyone who's ever been stranded on a burning planet.

-Rena Priest, Washington State Poet Laureate and author of Patriarchy Blues

Chris Gusta's acerbic wit is laced with tenderness in this collection of poems exploring love, loneliness, and the societal norms we take for granted. In "New Things in the World of Disease," Gusta wonders if "my well of experiences has been poisoned / and if everything interesting has already passed," only to remember the night "I laid in a giant puddle of spilled Dr. Pepper / on a movie theater floor in nothing but my underwear / so, there is always novelty". By turns poignant and hilarious, these poems peel back the polite exterior we present to the world and revel in the beauty of brutal truth-telling. After all, as Gusta writes in "Roll Away the Stone," "burying isn't better, / we just don't have to see it happen anymore."

-Elizabeth Vignali, author of House of the Silverfish

C. Gusta is a high school English teacher in the northwest corner of Washington. He has been published in several magazines and on numerous websites, such as Hoarse, Poetrynight, and Vice, as well as self-releasing a number of chat books and editing the late poetry zine Your Hands, Your Mouth. He enjoys a good sweater, and staring off into the void.

cover: Leah Wilemon.