Small Hours (T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry Winner, 2014) (New Odyssey)

2014 Foreword Reviews INDIEFAB Book of the Year Awards Finalist. By turns poignant and hopeful, raging and joyful, Small Hours interweaves the personal and the political, connecting family history to moments within a larger historical arc of injustice and oppression. The poems in this collection bear witness to those whose stories have fallen into the fractures of history and been lost, their mouths opening / below earth, their bodies / burning like forbidden books, about whom we know almost nothing. These poems ask us to recall the tyrants of the past as similar abuses of power repeat themselves in the present. Forgiveness and understanding vie with the memory of events that can never be redressed, only remembered, and sometimes redeemed.