About this item
The 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.
About the Author
Catherine Barnett is the author of three poetry collections, and , winner of the James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets. Her honors include a Whiting Award and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is a member of the core faculty of New York University's Creative Writing Program, a Distinguished Lecturer at Hunter College, and an independent editor in New York City.
