Human Hours: Poems

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Winner of the Believer Book AwardThe triumphant follow-up collection to The Game of Boxes, winner of the James Laughlin AwardCatherine Barnett's tragicomic third collection, Human Hours, shuttles between a Whitmanian embrace of others and a kind of rapacious solitude. Barnett speaks from the middle of hope and confusion, carrying philosophy into the everyday. Watching a son become a young man, a father become a restless beloved shell, and a country betray its democratic ideals, the speakers try to make sense of such departures. Four lyric essays investigate the essential urge and appeal of questions that are "accursed, " that are limited-and unanswered-by answers. What are we to do with the endangered human hours that remain to us? Across the leaps and swerves of this collection, the fevered mind tries to slow-or at least measure-time with quiet bravura: by counting a lover's breaths, by remembering a father's space-age watch, by envisioning the apocalyptic future while bedding down on a hard, cold floor, head resting on a dictionary. Human Hours pulses with the absurd, with humor that accompanies the precariousness of the human condition.