The Precarious Rhetoric of Angels

“In this beautiful book, Looney paints the slow dance of a human soul across the infinitely flat landscape of the Midwest, where dreams are informed by suffering, hope by loss. Capturing the capacity of the spirit to endure, these poems are careful, intricately rendered tapestries, at once funny and painful, that address the relentless quest of the human heart for meaning, magic, resolution, and definition. Brilliant and entertaining, Looney engages the reader even as he enlightens. Both plainspoken and mystically speculative, he takes you line by line to that place where heaven and earth, longing and grief, meet—and awe begins.”—Nin Andrews

George Looney is the chairman of the creative writing program at Penn State Erie and co-director of the Chautauqua Writers’ Festival.