A CLOUD OF WITNESSES is a verse-novel that is not in verse and isn't a novel. In it, people misplace objects, learn trivia about venomous snakes, and write their family histories in Morse code. Each poem is a chapter born of misremembered plots and of an affinity for the many texts it echoes. Imagination and memory intertwine. A vow of love is a confrontation of death where "To love someone you must dream about them dying."
"The traits of the book are themselves a personality: the monkish, loving way that the book arranges its words, its insistence that something fundamental and central is missing, the obvious boredom it feels at the prospect of moving from one event to another in causally determined lockstep. At turns playful, lonely, dreamy, and dead sincere, the book's manner of speaking is as complex as thought itself."
- Boxcar Poetry Review
"There is a music in them, these poems, a symphony told in blasts of scat beats, like thick little windows with differing views of a glorious whole."
- Josh Heggen
"excellent prose poems with a tight rhythmic backbone"
- Nathan Hoks, author of Reveilles
Click below to listen to the Preface and the title poem:
Preface
A Cloud of Witnesses