Geoffrey G. O'Brien's second collection documents the "remorse of the senses" that attends each moment of experience, the pain and pleasure of not exiting a world in which injustice and distraction secure every sensual event. Attempting to reestablish experience as something other than complicity, these poems insist on "desiring that which is as if it were not," making poetry out of neighborhood flyers, the Patriot Act, and the poverty of presidential speech. Given this mandate to stay within limited resources, Green and Gray makes a virtue of refusing to abandon them, often relying on...

Geoffrey G. O Brien s third collection opens with a set of lyric experiments whose music and mutable syntax explore the social relations concealed in material things. O Brien s poems measure the vague cadence of daily life, testing both the value and limits of art in a time of vanishing publics and permanent war. The long title poem, written in a strict iambic prose, charts the disappearance of the poetic into the prosaic, of meter into the mundane, while reactivating the very possibilities it mourns: O Brien s prosody invests the prose of things with the intensities of verse. In the charged...