Early Hour

Michael McGriff

Early Hour is a book-length sequence inspired by German Expressionist Karl Hofer’s 1935 painting (Frühe Stunde) of the same name. Between two bodies, a wild, surreal, and at times erotic landscape blooms—even as it is fractured. Michael McGriff’s sustained meditation forms a lyrical backcountry imbued with desire and cultural anxiety. These poems are an ode to Eros in a world unraveling.

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ISBN: 9781556595073

Format: Paperback

VI. THE AFTERLIFE

Even here, the stars are lug nuts
lost in the sawgrass.
My boots disappear
into the soft shoulder
of the ditch.
I forget my hometown.
The clocks grow immobile.
My country forgets my name.
Somehow, my life is reduced
to the lies I cut free
from the newspaper.
I start a fire with them.
I sleep next to it
with a woman
who’s lit from within
like jasper underwater,
like quail eggs
or suicide knobs.
I listen to the runoff creek
and threads of blue light
that want to outlive everything,
outlive the spur gears
running their black orbits
through the oil bath
in a horse’s skull.
I listen to something stamp
across the night’s blank face.

About the Author

Michael McGriff is an author, editor, and translator. He is the co-author, with J.M. Tyree, of the linked story collection Our Secret Life in the Movies, which was selected as one of NPR’s Best Books of 2014. His poetry collections include Early Hour; Black Postcards; Home Burial, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice; and Dismantling the Hills. He is the translator of Nobel laureate Tomas Tranströmer’s The Sorrow Gondola, and is the editor of a volume of David …

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Reviews

“Look, as an effete urban intellectual I don’t know a bucket of chicken guts from a Buick’s engine block. But I know Real Poetry when I read it; and it’s richly seamed through every tunnel we can possibly mine through this book.” —Albert Goldbarth

“He’s plunging into the depths of some underground waterway in the American psyche—what’s happening to the environment, what’s happening to jobs, what’s happening to families—and rising to the surface to show us the debris.” —Jeff Gordinier, New York Times

“McGriff’s vision of blue-collar life is one of complication and contradiction, and the poems he makes are authentic, unwavering, and unapologetically American.” —Judges’ citation, Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize, 2007

“An intriguing, frequently affecting experiment that challenges its readers to think anew about sharpening and refracting their memories of both life and art.” —Kirkus Reviews