Joal Hetherington’s prose poems are more poetry than prose, allusively piercing the fog of familiarity surrounding ordinary things, experiences, and turns of phrase to show forth their hidden iridescences. Whether the subject is insomnia (during which the mind, full of dissonance, becomes “a scale playing itself badly”), a good-bye (which afterward “turns to gone by”), or a secret (which “crouches in your mouth like a live thing”), the subtext is JH’s ever-manifest love of words, and of their power to surprise and delight. This is the genuine article: the work of a poet who has wrestled with the ineffable until it has grudgingly yielded up the well-said thing, and oftentimes along with that, the living truth itself. I know I’ll find myself returning to this book on those days when invention flags, and the limp winged creatures of my inner life seemingly can’t get airborne until they witness the miracle of words taking flight, again and again.
