Written over a fifteen-year period, a period in which events and politics seemed to defy reason, the poems collected in Tips to Help You Do Your Best seek an imaginative wisdom on the outskirts of conventional thinking. By writing obsessively about the landscape, the objects that litter it, and the people he finds loitering there, Mike Carlson arrives at the emotional truth of his experience, mapping the distance between irreverence and irony, cowardice, and courage, condolences and pure clear words.

In doing so, he also lays out a theory of poetry, a philosophical, aesthetic, and spiritual treatise that values object matter over subject matter. These poems approach understanding by image and rhythm, by light and shadow, and by means of encountering motorcycles and mushrooms and silos. While these poems often assume the authoritative and axiomatic tone of a guide book or set of instructions, they are at odds with easy explanation and drudgery.