There is a gentleness in the midst of savagery in Stuart Dischell's fifth full-length collection of poetry. These poems are ever aware of the momentary grace of the present and the fleeting histories that precede the instants of time. Part elegist, part fabulist, part absurdist, Dischell writes at the edges of imagination, memory, and experience. By turns socially outward and inwardly reflective, comic and remorseful, the beautifully crafted poems of Children with Enemies transfigure dread with a reluctant wisdom and come alive to the confusions and implications of what it means to be human.

Vivid poems full of drama and action by award-winning poet Stuart Dischell. Sometimes elegiac, sometimes deadly comic, and always transformative, The Lookout Man embodies the energy, spirit, and craft that we have come to depend upon in Stuart Dischell's poetry. Inhabiting a mix of lyric structures, these poems are set in diverse locales from the middle of the ocean to the summit of Mont Blanc, from the backyards of America to the streets of international cities. There is a hesitant, almost encroaching wisdom in The Lookout Man, as Dischell allows his edgy vision and singular perspectives to co-exist with the music of his poems. In lines that close the book and typify Dischell's work, he writes, "I will ask the dogwoods to remind me // What it means to live along the edges of the woods, / To be promiscuous but bear white flowers."

Another set of antidotal lyrics and story-poems from Stuart Dischell
Sly, comic, inventive, and exuberant, the brokenhearted lyrics and dark parables of "Backwards Days" are cast in the spirit and craft Stuart Dischell's poetry is known for. In this, his fourth full-length collection, he revs up both music and experience and writes startling poems of emotional intensity that chronicle the restlessness of desire. Sometimes grim, ever buoyant and hopeful, even in the most sorrowful or macabre situations, the poems of "Backwards Days" are most particularly about the movement of time, physical movement, and the movement of the heart. Through landscapes both real and of the psyche, they live on the edge of an elusive understanding never quite gotten right.

Stuart Dischell's poetry is passionate, darkly comic, heartbreaking, and always unpredictable. Dig Safe reaffirms why he commands high regard among poets and critics and popularity among his readers. Taking as their metaphor the markings that construction workers use to warn of utilities below street level—these new poems pierce the body politic as they evoke interconnection and misalliance, movement and inhabitation.