Shirtless Tattoo

Don Precosky teaches English at the College of New Caledonia. He is the
co-editor of It’s Still Winter, an online journal of contemporary
Canadian poetry and poetics, and Four Realities: Poets of Northern B.C.

Shirtless Tattoo is a collection of first-person poems written in a
short-line imagist manner. Armstrong exhibits a fondness for mixing
images of love and religion in a style reminiscent of Leonard Cohen
though without his sang froid.

For the most part the poems are finely drawn and pack some emotional
punch. Armstrong, however, is a little too fond of assuming the martyr
position: “I hang on the cross of your beauty / I am pinned by my
longing for you / My heart is a bird with no legs / My heart is a
shirtless tattoo.”