Luminous in the Owl's Rib

Poetry. 'What are the tones, the minor notes, ' he asks, 'dizzying me tonight, from a cafe / fifty-five years late?' That's a question George Kalamaras elucidates time and time again throughout a dazzling collection of scars and stars, worries and wondersâ tributes to brother Surrealists like Nikos Gatsos and jazz greats like Sonny Clark, tooâ figures who 'were meant to caress the keys // inside the soft places we show no one.' These poems form a series of long-after-midnight, everyone-else-in-the-world-is-asleep broadcasts that slip between laughter and tears like shortwave messages from faraway, incantatory and incandescent. 'How many moons' can we find 'in the golden yellow dead?' More than we thought. George Kalamaras sets off to discover them all.â Joseph Gastiger