Restless Astronomy: Poems New and Selected

Michael Gilmore is astonishingly good at pulling us into the center of what it means to ache with the power and vulnerability of art and love. He can capture the delicacy of lace caught in a button and equally eviscerate a pompous radio personality with Freudian puns of fish and cigars. Visual and visceral, Restless Astronomy slices into the madness coiled within the simultaneously bloated and anorexic American monster. Gilmore's x-ray insight into our historical blindness is at once bracing and heartbreaking. Poets call us to action that both acknowledges and refutes the power of one ego to determine the destiny of others. Yet, we must also act to face our common humanities. Gilmore trusts that the center will hold in the centrifuge of the human soul.