"From crooked roads and cold nipples, to ice fishing and Easter Sunday, this formidable collection traverses the sacred and the profane with bawdy humor and unflinching honesty, finding beauty in calamity and pathos in pop culture. Sanguine and subversive - these poems are as cagey and wiley as a Tom Waits song - at once rowdy and restrained- because these are thirsty poems, restless, urgent poems and at the center of all the searching, is love and wonder - our two great gifts. Cautery makes us feel a little less alone in the world." Steve Simoncic Musician & Writer "Reading this work, I found myself having a visceral response in my body. Brossiet doesn't flinch from the painful stuff when writing about his family and faith in all its ugliness and fracture. Cautery manages to transform suffering and survival into something rather luminous. Even in the hardest stories, beauty and meaning can be found." Rick Sullivan American Abstract ArtistAaron Brossiet has poems published previously in The Mac Guffin, Sky Magazine, Mudfish Magazine, Passager and online at Redneck Review and Jet Fuel Review. He also won the 2010 Literary Life Bookstore poetry competition judged by Heather Sellers and was short listed in the 2012 Fish Short Memoir Prize judged by David Shields . He earned his M.F.A. in creative writing at the University of Texas El Paso.