This collection includes poems which first appeared in Columbia Poetry Review, Denver Quarterly, Santa Barbara Review, Situation and Willow Springs.

Permutations of the Gallery is an ambitious collection, even if recklessly so. Joshua McKinney's poems struggle against the confines of syntax and literal sense, in order to arrive at a uniquely clear grasp of the truces we must maintain with time and spacial existence. To attempt to paraphrase these knotty and paradoxical poems would be akin to stating that Wallace Stevens wrote about the weather. Don't search for narrative threads here, poems about Queen Anne's Lace or cicadas, or paeans for our humdrum, domestic lives. And don't expect to read this book once.

--Naton Leslie

A poetry held taut, that revels in economy and clarity, that is filled with insights and compassion. I highly recommend Permutations of the Gallery.

--Simon Perchik

Joshua McKinney knows that philosophy is not an abstract matter, nor in anyway separate from our everyday lives. His poems show that to engage the world intimately, we need to think it in the most particular ways. In Permutations of the Gallery, family, friends, nature, and a troubling social world are not givens, but rather questions by which we explore the twisting, disruptive, ecstatic, sometimes even annihilating terms of our existence.

--Mark Wallace

Joshua McKinney grew up in the mountains of northern California near the Oregon border where he worked as a seasonal firefighter for the United States Forest Service. In 1988, he travelled to Japan where he earned a black belt in kendo (Japanese fencing). He holds a Ph.D in English from the University of Denver. His poetry has been published widely. This is his first collection of poems.