Early hour

About this book

""It's [McGriff's] language that keeps you reading along, transfixed."--New York Times Book Review "A lyricist at heart, McGriff is a masterful maker of metaphor." --Third Coast "McGriff's vivid grit remains hard to gainsay."--Publishers Weekly A book-length sequence inspired by the Nazi-persecuted German Expressionist painter Karl Hofer's work, McGriff's third collection meditates on eros, cosmology, independence, provenance, "occupied territories," and deviance. Detailed yet indeterminately American landscapes flood with surrealist dream imagery and subtle violence, while the voice of these poems intertwines between the intimately personal and the honestly imagined--all while remaining plainspoken, angular, direct. From Cosmology The river moves beneath the sheet ice. The wind is a grand hall of records. In the recipe box above the refrigerator, the deathbed photos of four generations-- somewhere, their hands have turned to prime numbers