On Hours

Poetry. In ON HOURS, his second stunning collection, Marc Rahe reveals himself as an occasionally grave and often humorous master of observation whose poems note the natural in the mechanical and the wild in the wonder. Rahe's lines track such gestures as a hand as it lands on the back of one's lover, the alien glow of a flash-lit finger, and a single "cloud of promise" versus those that are withholding. "We took/ a picnic and a shadow/ board. To look without// looking," he writes, followed by the eerie query: "Where/ do you go, after?" This is a collection of contemplations worthy of returning to as one returns to their Montaigne or their Bacon.