Human Hours
Poems
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the Believer Book Award
The triumphant follow-up collection to The Game of Boxes, winner of the James Laughlin Award
Catherine 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Barnett (The Game of Boxes) ponders "the silvery green light of time" in her elegantly understated third collection. According to Barnett, time is more than a phenomenon to be sorted into a "packet of minutes"; rather, it's the "hours making things/ that matter to no one." The title evokes both quietly quotidian passages as well as mechanized schedules, while echoing a more common unit with which pet owners are familiar: dog years. Barnett presses readers to consider concepts of time as though through the eyes of another species when observing how humans age and confront mortality. "Maybe best not to ask when will what take whom where and to do what," she writes. Yet Barnett's queries, each more revealing and surprising than the last, compose the backbone of this collection: "Are sex and death the only rafts out of here?" She also reveals the ravages of time through portraits of her father. "When I look at him now/ I see all of the fathers/ he's been / a funhouse mirror of fathers./ It's not a tragedy, my friend tells me,/ and she's right." Barnett claims that she'd "like to feel a little less, know a little more," but the emotional depth and observational nuance of these poems is something to behold.
