Tough Skins is a tough and dazzling collection of poems. The originality of the language invigorates the reader and keeps us wanting more. Broken into five sections, Bremer’s collection takes the reader on an unbridled ride through the streets of derelicts and men struggling to simply live. In other sections, in short and moving lyrics, the poet reflects of life passages. Throughout, the poet’s music and language carry us forward. Fearless and original, these poems resonate with an anguished passion that somehow retains a perfect pitch throughout.

—Jonah Bornstein, author of The Art of Waking, Treatise on Emptiness, and Mortar

P.B. Bremer’s Tough Skins demonstrates the clear-eyed, cunning intellect of the poet doubling as philosophical gadfly, recalling the work of writers like Alan Dugan, David Ignatow, and Stephen Dobyns. His poems are lean, fearless, and rife with mordant wit and keen music. Flinty observations of human cruelty and frailty are balanced with tremendous empathy for those on the psychological edge, the margins of a gilded America. The imagery is exacting and local, but beckons toward ineffable spaces that are a special province of poetry—the daily appointment with the unknowable, the engagement with looming mortality, the intractable mystery of simply existing—as Bremer writes, “I too must eat from its plate/scraped clean of meaning,/always the restless guest in its bed.

—Tim Earley, author of Linthead Stomp, Boondoggle, and The Spooking of Mavens

In Tough Skins, P.B. Bremer’s debut book of poems, we discover work in the gritty tradition of Charles Bukowski, poems that speak to the depravity of human life, that remember the downtrodden---including the speaker---at their wits’ end. Call it Bremer’s metaphysic of despair: problematic love, suicides, homelessness, day labor and malt whiskey before tears and climbing three flights in the YMCA to room 302 where he can quit the day and “smoke his last cigarette.” But what takes these poems beyond a simple litany of damage is his imagination and striking sense of language, his music (Muddy Waters and Coltrane) and his metaphoric leaps, the “hours that drift/without paddles,”“memory’s forgotten backcountry,” “the silent movie of sleep.” These poems feel elegiac and clear-eyed. Meant to be read over again, these poems find salvation in the moment of each word, the poet speaking from “empty moon rooms/of his heart.”

—James McKean, author of Headlong, Tree of Heaven, and We Are the Bus

About the Author

P.B. Bremer was raised in the corn and bean fields of Missouri and Iowa. He was educated at Mount Mercy University, the University of Iowa, and the University of Denver respectively, where he majored in English,English Education, and Professional Creative Writing. For the past twenty years, he has lived and worked in Denver, Colorado where he teaches English full-time in the Concurrent Enrollment Program at Front Range Community College in the School of Writing and Literature.