Surfaces is John Tipton's first full-length collection of poems. Here is a world of Cartesian precision, where matrices and Markov chains are revealed by the lattice of snowfall and the improbable order of ants. Yet the irrational and the absurd are not exiled from these poems, warping and defining their contours instead: "here the geography is the horizon here / Oklahoma moves him in ways he regrets . . ."