Vargtimmen/Unwanted Invention

Poetry. Four years after the release of his debut collection, Joshua Ware delivers his second and third books of poetry in a single, tête- bêche artifact. In UNWANTED INVENTION and VARGTIMMEN, respectively, Ware charts the luckless lovers' course: from ecstatic origins to inevitable disillusionment. UNWANTED INVENTION, the first volume of these companion collections, explores Wallace Stevens' dictum that in poetry "imagination must not detach itself from reality." To this extent, the "you" and "I" of these poems reside in a space both familiar and strange as they travel through cities, cornfields, motel rooms, and mountains. In doing so, they create an ethereal realm in which love poems flourish and, ultimately, dissipate into the "irregular forms" of darkness. Legend has it that Vargtimmen, Swedish for the Hour of the Wolf, is the time before dawn in which people sleep the deepest, nightmares are the most vivid, and ghosts are most powerful. Like its namesake, VARGTIMMEN inhabits this realm, meditating on how loss of love breeds isolation, hysteria, and the "empty stagger of obsession." Imbued with moonlight, these poems invoke lunar motifs in an effort to both document and prevent the speaker's unraveling.