DEAD MOUSE POEMS is something of a shape-shifter. One reviewer describes it as "surprising" and "often laugh-out-loud funny." While the poetry is in places humorous or quirky, with little warning the tone turns somber, then uplifting, then perplexing, sometimes marked by a serene fatigue. The poet's observations are frequently ambivalent, occasionally unsettling, and consistently original. Title aside, it is not only the corpses of rodents one finds within these pages. Other dead creatures also appear--a horse, a cat, a fish, a few human beings--as well as much that is alive. Centrally present, too, are those elements that are neither dead nor alive, such as water, sky, moonlight, and time. Human spirit emerges in the poems from the interplay among these various elements. "But what is the spirit?" the poet Adam Zagajewski once wrote. "In the case of poetry...it's simpler to say what the spirit isn't. It's not psychoanalytic any more than it is behavioral, sociological, or political. It is holistic, and in it are reflected, as in an astronaut's helmet, the earth, the stars, and a human face." Kevin Acers' astronaut helmet of poetry bears this out. It indeed reflects the earth, the stars, and a human face, albeit one with a slightly puzzled expression. Looking more closely at the curved glass one also sees unexpected images of hummingbirds, insects, clouds, a beautiful woman boarding a bus, a dog chasing cars, an old man sitting in the rain, a child doubled over in laughter--and more than one dead mouse.