Unnecessary Tattoo and Other Stains on a Stainless Steel Heart

Among the several themes considered in his first collection of poems, Broken Borders, John L. Holgerson wrote about the landscape of the heart and the often shattered boundaries found there in the relationships between men and women as they try to balance love and desire with faithfulness and a search for individuality. In his second book of poems, the chapbook Unnecessary Tattoo and Other Stains on a Stainless Steel Heart, Holgerson continues this examination and exploration of the intertwining of commitment and identity and also comments on the internal struggles of identity within the art of poetry itself. At the book s outset, he declares "the poems we write are merely tattoos we have peeled from the skin of our hearts." In Unnecessary Tattoo, those tattoos consist of flowing lines and sensory images inked onto the page in both rhyme and free verse storytelling. With a voice that is eclectic and searching, John L. Holgerson "carves inks," both personal and universal, peeled from the skin of a lyric heart even if it is made of stainless steel.