Massey’s taut minimalism converts the things peopling these landscapes—trees, fog, parking lots, the feral subject matter one might expect to locate in a volume of status-quo ecology—into an investigation of emotional and philosophical import that tends more toward universality than locality.
On the cover of Look is a copy of the first photograph ever taken, which charges the book with similar visual implications to tread carefully.
Sympathetically surreal, funny and tragic, The Book of Joshua is an unusual book, and an unusually good one.
That’s the heartbreak that the poems in the collection can’t stop nibbling at. What if this is as good as it will ever get again? What then?
For Graham Foust, the subject to which he has returned most often across the arc of his previous five volumes—coming back like bees circling though the hive has long vanished—is postmodern malaise, the quiet desperation of 21st-century suburban life and the scattered moments of authentic joy that sometimes, intermittently, charge that life with an emotional electricity it otherwise lacks.
The boy came to a clearing on the far side of the forest. An abandoned piano sat in the dead grass. It was out of tune, but that was fine—he hardly knew the difference. At first, he played some notes just to hear them, nothing in particular. But soon he found himself playing the curve […]
1. One crow is good luck. Two crows, bad. Ladybug, ladybug: your house caught fire. One petal: he loves you. One petal: loves you not. Here is the body: stiff as a stick. Here is the feather: now you float. She’s looking sick: she’s dying, dead. One petal left: you’re dying, you’re dead. One crow: […]
All around us, society is being used to tell itself a story. Know what it doesn’t say? Doesn’t say precisely how this one brick got here, how it got to be part of this walkway, only one of its faces visible. Doesn’t say how this brick shines with wind. You’re beautiful. One thing I’m not […]
at sunrise I say light shut up reset the dashboard clock while swerving a travel mug rolling in the passenger footwell that was not, it turns out, spill-proof boulder in the rearview, like some molecular rushing outran its invasive historic wearing away pitted weed against parasite and hollowed out my placeless worry left my initials […]
When I stared into the alpenglow When I dared to drink the water and water was nil When silence was a flock of sheep, and a path a line broke my concentration Planes lifted above our heads when it was easy to manage the remote and was easy I touched the base of a sycamore […]