Damon McLaughlin is an Iowa native who now lives with his wife and daughter in Tucson, Arizona where he teaches writing and enjoys the city's surrounding sky islands. An M.F.A. graduate of the University ofArizona and a Pushcart nominee, he has work in numerous internet and print publications including the Best New Poets series and Red, White, and Blues: Poets on the Promise of America. He squeezes music out of his blue guitar when he has the chance.

Books by Damon McLaughlin: Exchanging Lives

Other poems on the web by Damon McLaughlin:
Three poems
"On the Monarch of the Seas"
"These Poems About Noelle’s Body"
"Empty Vessel"
"Jacklight"
"Homecoming"
"To The Woman Who Tried To Take My Poems"
"Instincts"

About Exchanging Lives:

"In Exchanging Lives Damon McLaughlin names litanies of fliers and swimmers: birds (crow, hawk, hummingbird, sparrow); insects (blowfly, firefly, moth, mosquito); fish (bluegill, herring, sardine, steelhead). Full of startling images, these poems invoke those creatures that dip and rise to confront 'the vortex of change,' always offering—like a 'butterfly [that] lift[s] delicacy from its caterpillar body'—a potential for salvation."
—Vince Gotera

"'What rushed into us changed us,' 'What illuminates disintegrates simultaneously': These are the themes continually tested in Damon McLaughlin’s book, in poems sung with the slow cadences of the blues, set in the natural world & infused with metaphors so sensual & evocative they create their own metaphysics. The people who inhabit these tender, sometimes humorous anecdotes float in that momentary limbo where change is dangerous, possible, and necessary: a couple makes love on a precipice, two boys play at suicide and come out of the river 'like retired ghosts' and a goofy man sits on a bench trying to decide whether he’s in love or not, and with whom. And lest I forget, a moth is saved because a sparrow does a tap dance and opens its mouth to sing, and a beetle lugs another beetle home for lunch."
—Steve Orlen