“This collaboration is a triumph. The language is so sharp and the description so precise, each poem unveils images that leave you with a kind of synesthesia. One sense stirs another until the world of the book becomes your own. You see things you didn’t know you’ve been wanting and waiting to see: Spanish Moss lashing dragonflies, an afternoon’s impersonal reverie. You cannot rest, nor should you. As you read these poems reverberating at every turn, you wish there was more of you to absorb every chord they strike. According to Discretion is electrifying.” —Erica Dawson, author of The Small Blades Hurt

“The poems in According to Discretion wander the world and send back reports full of marvelous observations. We are treated to a statue of the Madonna and her child being sniffed by a curious dog in Spain, coffins being hammered shut in Normandy, lids flying off trash cans in homage to the jazz musician Charles Mingus in Greenwich, money being burned to pay tribute to a dead relative in Taiwan, and peat smoke drifting over junipers shellacked by sleet in Ireland. In a poem about America’s Bicentennial, several people sit on top of cars “waiting for something miraculous” to happen. Readers of According to Discretion don’t have to wait; poem after poem deliver accounts of the miraculous in everyday events. This collection, which often draws inspiration from jazz musicians, abstract expressionist painters, and other writers, is full of surprises that will delight readers for years to come.” —Henry Hart, author of Background Radiation

“Allen Jih and Adam Vines’ According to Discretion is a series of relay races, each poet adding a burst of speed as the baton is passed on and then passed back with dizzying panache. But it’s also an energetic anatomy of middle-class American life with a realist’s reluctant appreciation of the surreality that surrounds us: “You wish it all to be a simple hallucination.” Meanwhile nature serenely goes about its business of unknowningly chastising human artifice. According to Discretion is vibrant and enthralling poetry.” —Andrew Hudgins, author of A Clown at Midnight

Allen Jih currently resides in Las Vegas, where he works as an acrobat specializing in aerial straps. He has performed on America’s Got Talent and has worked with Cirque Du Soleil in their annual “One Night for One Drop” charity event. He holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Florida.

Adam Vines is an assistant professor of English at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, where he is Editor of Birmingham Poetry Review and Director of the English Honors Program. He is the author of The Coal Life (University of Arkansas Press, 2012). During the summers, he is on staff at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference.