Born in the Wrong Desert sketches a psychogeography of a desert metropolis populated with seekers and refugees, fishmongers and barflies-a landscape as defined by backyard grills and barber shops as it is by starkness and sunshine. With his debut chapbook, Tentser offers us a personal and poetic map of otherness and belonging.

Francisco Cantú author of The Line Becomes a River

Misha Tentser's Born in the Wrong Desert has all the best stuff you want in poems: Naked psychotic men at Burger King, Russians filleting salmon at Rincon Market, huevos rancheros at Benny's, twerking rabbis, dead friends dressed up like Kurt Cobain. The magic trick of these poems is to stitch the there to the here, the absent to the present. After Russia invades Ukraine the absent becomes only too present, with devastating consequences there but also here, in Misha, and we're left with him in the space between silence and stillness, singing the only song he can. It's a good one.

Ander Monson, author of I Will Take the Answer: Essays

These are sensitive, carefully wrought poems that register an appetite to drive us down where grief becomes, if not home, a hostel for the weary traveler on their way to belonging. Tentser delivers nostalgia and melancholy by sensitizing his attention to the impressions bodies can leave on one another, and the places we inhabit. Where else can we find home, these poems ask, but at the ends of our living fingertips?

Farid Matuk, author of Redolent and The Real Horse