The compelling prose poems in Oakland, I’m Not Dead are infused with surreal imagery, humor, and memorable vignettes. Keith Gaboury breathes human awareness into animals, body parts, and plants, even produce, and then he engages the entity in conversation. Each poem draws you into an alternate world and inspires you to keep reading. In “Childhood Conversation,” we meet Elizabeth, the poet’s hippocampus and keeper of his childhood memory, and the woodpecker in “New Roommate” launches a convincing argument to accept droppings as rent. In “Birth Head,” a daughter born with a head of lettuce becomes one of many heads in the supermarket aisle. As a Walt Whitman lover, I especially enjoyed “Brain Dreaming,” where a synthetic reproduction of Whitman’s brain might be reincarnated in a diner’s stomach. Set in the common surroundings of Lake Merritt, grocery stores, and apartments, the poems reveal the magic around us. In the title poem, for example, the city of Oakland mutates into deadly weather, a squid, and a feeding buzzard. These poems will leave you interrogating your environment and enjoying the experience.

Terry Tierney, author of The Poet’s Garage and Why Trees Stay Outside