Einstein spoke dismissively of "spooky action at distance," the idea that separate objects could somehow share a simultaneous condition across space and time, or what is sometimes referred to as quantum entanglement. Yet the phrase persists and serves as a powerful metaphor for the work poetry does. In John Mulrooney's amazing new book, lyric performs this entanglement, bridging distant states of mind and registers of experience with a swiftness and a surprise that is indeed spooky. ... The suffering and loss of this world haunts these poems with an elemental pathos, the power of a fading logos written in the language of ghosts who still speak out of the dark in a human voice. -Patrick Pritchett
SAMPLE POEM:
Poem After Solstice
for John Wieners
A storm is
a rhetorical device,
a retrieval of lost syllables,
rain foils the foliage to be
and it's got something up
my sleeve.
The year I was born
a god sauntered down the boardwalk
on Revere Beach and stole your girl
with his stare.
I retained nothing I stared at
that year or the next
although it's likely most
of what I did
was stare;
an impregnable embrace of the world
that those around me probably called wonder.
The first propriety squandered.
