Tremors, a collection by poet Gary Beck, holds within its pages a grand combination of both free verse and rhyming poetry. His poems touch on his viewpoints of civilization as it is today, and where it has been. The words hit you like an energy field, shocking you into his world. A voice carries through in such a visceral way that you are transported to that place, a place not physical, but more into the specific mindset that he was in when he wrote the poem. The poems are perfect in their length, and have no fat or fluff attached. They are perfect steaks ready for consumption.

In Gary Beck’s Tremors, I fell in love with the poem “Sacrifice.” The way in which it trots along so un-modernly and then, in the end, it hits you in the gut and faces you with the problems of most people’s worlds right now with only these two words, “credit card.” Beck has a keen way of unsettling you, keeping you on your toes, not letting the reader know if he’s going to zig or zag. It is that same exciting, unsettling feeling that one might experience on a rollercoaster. One of the lines I treasured most is short and simple – “and hardly refreshed/rushed back to burdens” – deriving from the poem “Entropy.” Being transported in a book is essential for it to be successful, and you will definitely be taken to another place while reading this book of poems, I can assure you.