Author Description

When he was a boy, Elliot pressed himself up against the plate glass of the noumenal world. He made a face, and when the noumenal world made a face back, he was scared. Ever since then, like some kind of neo-objectivist anchorite running amok, whose daily reprieve depends on the purposeful brick by brick removal in order to see or re-see, he has been fleeing the cloister of this world only to find himself again in this world. In this third full-length collection, he breathes life into the everyday so that we can stop and pick it up and look at it and see that it is, and therefore we are, or might be, whole, too. These poems restore the magic of anonymity to a city bus, a park bench, a tree, a man and his dog, his loop of thought, and in doing so strip away what and who we think we are, laying bare the that-ness that's there, a little to the left and beyond the frame, a that-ness that seems to make a face back at us and we laugh.