Michael O'Leary

The Reception Michael O'Leary

Poetry. These narrative and lyric poems draw one in, word by word and line by line. Rooted in a desirous present, they reach forward into the future, and one wants to reach with them.

In my dream of this book, the dead are carried high up overhead. They upbraid the ground, its evacuations, and don't come to rest. Michael O'Leary, with THE RECEPTION, gives us the watchman of the terrible hour--the upbound city, reconnaissance, with its fragile, unremitted geometries--and we, his readers, are made tenuous, and beholden, and in nite, by the verse's elegant tendering of 'the supple granulation of a very ancient wound.' This is a nest elegy, to the day, and so to history, its suspirations, and the ossatures that, imperfectly, receive it.--Nathanaël