Nude Male with Echo

Darren C. Demaree’s collection Nude Male with Echo examines and challenges male vanity, power, and expectation.  While exploring the place of his gender in this world, Demaree’s attempt to expand upon the expectations of “what makes a man”, while drilling down into the artistic framework provided by the body and aging provides a new landscape for these modern questions. Nude Male with Echo, Demaree’s thirteenth full-length collection, utilizes fresh language, energy, and abstraction to confront the typical arcs of his gender’s role in society.  These poems drag and batter “maleness” into what it is, a failing qualifier, and leaves us with the hope that it can be much more that what it has been in the past.