Like a homemade pipe bomb shoved deep inside a data center, With One's Own Eyes is a rollicking, strange, and violent collection of poems whose topics range from Yukio Mishima's ghost encountering Pippin (“Translation”) to genocide (“Confession II”) to a double act defending and insulting T.S. Eliot (“Ventriloquist Act”), and toxic masculine urges (“Honest Tinder Bio, 4th Draft”). Influenced by folk murder ballads, the writer's neurodivergence, Stan Brakhage, Stephen Jonas, and Sylvia Plath, With One's Own Eyes asks the reader how one grapples with the distinctly American problem of being a bad person while trying to find a sense of peace, even in the age of climate breakdown and live-streamed death.

"There is nothing sacred or off limits for poet C. M. Crockford, a kind of No Holds Bard; a rambunctious, audacious and exhilaratingly naughty wordsmith stepping into each poem with the savvy and range of Milton, Blake and John Dos Passos all rolled into one striped stick of chewing gum like Willie Wonka's 3-course meal of tomato soup, roast beef and blueberry pie. There's a lot to masticate here, and it gets better every second." - DA Powell

The primary movement of Crockford's poems is the clinamen -- not in Harold Bloom's sense, but the original atomic sense of Epicurus: the unpredictable swerve of the atom from which free will itself is born. These poems smash pop- and high-cultural references into vivid fragments of visceral perception, and the arcs they trace against and away from one another enact a poetics of free will: of a self which, apprehending its place in a vast system of slop and blood and money, summons the will to wrench away -- to swerve. - Matthew Kosinski, author of Year of the Inverted Star