Angles of Incidents

Poetry. "Jon Curley does not work within inherited registers and meters of the rhetorical tradition..., a tradition whose paradigm is perfection; instead this younger poet, uninterested in nostalgia, finds the music of his own time, or better to say he creates it. That he allows this music to guide his poems toward their provisional truths, the only truths anyone can hope to know—that he estabishes a music and within it a way of knowing authentic to our present—is a testament not only to his honesty but to his skill as well. Thus this marvelous volume of thoughtful lyricism, in all its skeptical rigor, provides a guide for how to live in our tremulous moment—his poems' 'figuration lurching between / incandescence and oblivion.' ANGLES OF INCIDENTS, in setting out for a new world, sets out a new world—a world that, for all its difficulties, has its beauties too."—Burt Kimmelman