Sensitive Skin features art, writing and music, without rules or boundaries, by both famous and emerging artists, writers, and musicians from around the globe.
Sensitive Skin is proud to present Border Crossings, acclaimed writer Thaddeus Rutkowski’s first full-length collection of poetry.
“In Border Crossings, Thaddeus Rutkowski collects an engrossing narrative of one-page poems that mine autobiographical terrain with a nuanced eye—the borders we devour while surviving the detritus we absorb. The writer’s mechanism is to unfurl the speed of his imagination across new territories unlocked at every reading. Rutkowski understands that in maneuvering brief cinematic bites, the psychological glimpse can be a marvel of the subconscious—an intermorphed parallel reality, envisioned from edge more than center. With the storytelling facility of a novelist who skims the underbelly of the everyday, like Miyazaki with a shiv, Rutkowski places us squarely in line with his enormously creative yet quiet precision to expose the human vulnerabilities that we can’t help but live through, for “it’s the people, mainly the people / that we have come to see.”
—Edwin Torres, author of Ameriscopia.
“There is an eerie and edgy appeal to Rutkowski’s spare poems and in his sly, deadpan humor as he takes potshots at an absurdist world. Sometimes playful, ultimately serious, the poet brings an unusual heritage—Polish and Chinese—to his observations of travels in China and about farm work (he grew up in central Pennsylvania). He also shows a Buddhist-like respect for wolf spiders, beetles and birds. One ends up cheering this poet’s curiosity and humanity, wanting more stories, more poems.”
—Colette Inez, author of The Luba Poems
“Thaddeus Rutkowski’s book Border Crossings is a collection of mind-crossing, relentless poems—the work of a person abiding in two worlds, never quite comfortable in either. The poems are straightforward, reflecting his American side, but they are rich with references to the world of his Chinese mother. In “Mother’s Advice” he’s told to “walk to the water circle, / dive to the bottom, / and nail your question / to the dragon’s door.” It is this near-voyeurism that leads Rutkowski to the truth he finds in words.”
—Bertha Rogers, founding director, Bright Hill Press
Sensitive Skin began as a print venture from New York’s Lower East Side in the 1990s, and published such literary luminaries as Richard Hell, Steve Cannon, Jack Micheline, Penny Arcade, John Farris, Eileen Myles, Lynne Tillman, Patrick McGrath, Bob Holman, Maggie Estep, Emily XYZ, Herbert Huncke and Joel Rose, with art by Andres Serrano, Ari Marcopolis, Andrew Castrucci and James Romberger, to name but a few….
Sensitive Skin was reborn in the summer of 2010, and has since presented original work by such esteemed writers, artists and musicians as Samuel R. Delaney, John Lurie, Gary Indiana, Sharon Mesmer, Charles Gatewood, Gretchen Faust, Alex Katz, Peter Blauner, Hal Sirowitz, Arthur Nersesian, Maggie Estep, Fred Frith, Evelyn Bencicova, Thurston Moore, Iggy Pop, Winston Smith, Sue Rynski, Steve Dalachinsky, Marty Thau, Justine Frischmann, Craig Clevenger, Darius James, Stewart Home, Michael A. Gonzales, Drew Hubner, Jonathan Shaw, Melissa Febos, Stephen Lack, Max Blagg, Patricia Eakins, Díre McCain, Rob Roberge, Kurt Wolf, Erika Schickel, John S. Hall, Kevin Rafferty, Elliott Sharp, Mike Hudson, James Greer, Ruby Ray, William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg.