Whatever happens in increments
– the coffee ring
in the corner of this page dimmer than the last –
happens as premonition and anamnesis
like everything
No surprise I think I smell a fugue
coming on those golden numbers
more like church bells
So hard at work not minding
the gap it feels like revelation to fall
in bed and worry about infinity,
adjacency, how much you will miss
loving the person beside you in increments
how much you are missing I mean and
will be once stepped out of
Underlight
Aaron McCollough
December 2012
I am blinded by this book’s dark beauty, its careful precision, its generous offerings.
Sasha Steensen
Aaron McCollough’s fifth book, Underlight, is a dialogue of selves progressing through the Möbius turns of innocence and experience, materiality and faith, despair and reason. Underlight is a lyric inquiry into the problems of being and community. It opens itself gradually outward to embrace complication but also accountability as redemptive virtues in a life always on the brink of nihilism.
About the Author
Aaron McCollough is the author of No Grave Can Hold My Body Down (2011), Little Ease (2006), Double Venus (2003), and Welkin (2002). He is the librarian for English Language and Literature and for Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan’s Hatcher Graduate Library. He lives in Ann Arbor.
Praise
Aaron McCollough’s poetry is a living system that is one part the assa ulted world and one part the world’s conscious surveyor. In Underlight 'a private sorrow drapes' revealing an ecology of disappointment where the poet reports 'hearing at least feels like holding and where else does it go.' While the music here plumbs various shapes a final hour can t ake, it also insists we should never agree to an end without first having our most heartfelt say, 'Making love, we used the dark for leverage.' Underlight is full of such impossible machines all d oing emergency work.
Peter Richards
Underlight shines its luminescence under bodies large and sma ll. Desiccated spiders, fields of clover, a leaf’s spine, the anatomy of the soul, an entire fores t’s understory, all unfold under this stunning light. Drawn in through vision, the urge to see bec omes the urge to hold, however tenuous such holdings might be. But what is held in this book is he ld aside in ecstasy, until even what I knew I held—my own body—stands beside me. Under 'the pressu re and underlight, / where soul is burin / and self is soft line away,' I look at looking. I am bl inded by this book’s dark beauty, its careful precision, its generous offerings. I cannot look awa y.
Sasha Steensen
Publication Details
ISBN: 978-1-937027-08-7
Trade Paperback
Perfect-bound. 96 pp, 5 x 7 in
Publication Date: December 13 2012
Distribution: SPD