I wake up tangled in pillows and sheets by Alex Baskin

I wake up tangled in pillows and sheets delves into memory to weave together themes of religion, spirituality, and sexuality. The poems use recollection to reflect and re-examine interpersonal relationships and community systems, and their entanglement with inherited beliefs and rituals. While embracing intimate moments, Baskin mediates empathy and care alongside critique. These poems negotiate cultural knowledge, personal experience, and social calling, centering the speaker's agency in the body. In this way, home, too, is reframed from a definitive, static geography, to a movable, flexible, and shifting presence. To quote the poet himself, "I get to decide where this poem goes / how it moves, what it makes."

Alex Baskin is a hospital chaplain and a poet, rooted in over a decade of Buddhist practice and his upbringing in an orthodox Jewish family and community. He holds a bachelor's degree in philosophy from Tufts University and a master's of divinity degree from Harvard Divinity School. His poetry has appeared in Gulf Coast, Redivider, The Christian Century, poetry.onl, and elsewhere. He is a Best of the Net nominee, a runner-up for the MoonLit Getaway Poetry Contest, a finalist for the Lucky Jefferson Poetry Prize, and an honorable mention for the Northwind Writing Award. He has an essay in Refuge in the Storm: Buddhist Voices in Crisis Care (North Atlantic Books, 2023) and a poem in the anthology Ache: The Body's Experience of Religion (Flipped Mitten Press, 2024.) This is his debut chapbook. Originally from New Jersey, he lives in Massachusetts.

The speaker of the first poem in I wake up tangled in pillows and sheets declares, 'I am exactly the size of my body,' cueing us to Baskin's preoccupation with both the body's triumphs and its vulnerabilities. In voices at once youthfully confessional and anciently rabbinical, these poems nimbly shift from affectionate to wise-cracking to defiant. The body takes the poet everywhere. As Baskin puts it, 'in my quietest moments my taut / skin reaches the corners of creation.'

— Erica Funkhouser, author of Post and Rail

Alex Baskin's I wake up tangled in pillows and sheets is a treasure trove of ordinary miracles, a collection full of both passion and humility. These poems handle the heavy world with a light touch, and like a glass filled exactly to the brim without overflowing, they arrive at a sincerity absent of theatrics. Baskin has found a voice that is grounded in image but prismatic in scope, as if every line uncovers another brilliant jewel of Indra's Net. Watch it shimmer-so intimate and tender and earnest that you can't help but be amazed.

— Zach Goldberg, author of I'd Rather Be Destroyed

I wake up tangled in pillows and sheets drifts between fraught relationships with god, Judaism, desire, home, and place, reminding us always that 'there could be no stories without bodies.' Certainly, this is true of this speaker who mines the corporeal to expand our understanding of what poems can and should do, insisting that 'we don't need a poem / to tell us what the world is like.' And yet, these poems do just that: they make coherence and chaos of the world simultaneously, fracturing and reassembling our sense of the self again and again. After all, as Baskin declares, ‘It was not his / first shattering.’

— Allison Field Bell, author of All That Blue