Spooky Action: poems

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.