From childhood to elegies and curmudgeonly rants, the poems in Permanent Record seek to explore what has remained memorable in Mark Vinz’s life. As Roland Dille, former English professor and president of Moorhead State University, has aptly noted, “A Vinz poem almost always begins as a clearly observed piece of the real, even dull world. But it is soon transformed. . . . and the vivid imagery has given us what Thom Tammaro has called ‘fragments and glimpses of the truth.’ The commonplace has grown complex.” 

Some Responses to Previous Books

“Mark Vinz is in and of this great rolling middle of America. He knows and loves this place and these people he has lived among, the backroads, the mementoes, the omens and emblems of our lives.” – Tom Montag

“These poems are filled with a sane, decent, clear-eyed melancholy. . . . memories of rooms, people, landscapes loved and named with clarity and affection.” – Bill Holm

“Mark Vinz’s poems, spare as the prairie country in which they are mainly set, cast a quiet spell that runs deep and lasts.” – Paul Gruchow