Swinging on a Star

"Reading Swinging on a Star was like watching a great old movie: without warning, what began as effortless pleasure suddenly opened up a world inside of me, a sensual magic lantern of memories. These poems will take you from smiling quietly to reaching for the tissues."—Jennifer Moxley

"Swinging on a Star unfolds with grace, precision, and gentle humor as it probes the possibilities of self-knowledge, dream-knowledge, and words themselves. The magical, ordinary world of things that has been Trinidad's unequaled terrain now finds its singer questing in the realm of human connection and mortality." —Lisa Fishman

"I'm not sure I believe Trinidad's speaker: 'Not all sins / can be confessed // Must keep some secrets / buried // where words / won't reach.' Such a pronouncement feels more like invitation to plunder secrets, excavate with words, confess with sweat. And that is precisely the trickster in Trinidad's collections that readers have come to expect and look forward to. Enjoy Swinging on a Star! (And while you're at it, cuddle up with 'The Fifty-Foot Woman's huge / papier-mâché hand.')"—Kimiko Hahn

''The afterlife of fame / is dark.' David Trinidad understands this better than any poet this side of Emily Dickinson. 'O float me to Oblivion / in my swan bed.' If at times our prospects look bleak, we are nevertheless reminded, again and again throughout these minimalist meditations on immortality, that the afterlife of language is poetry."—Suzanne Buffam