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From Stephen Elliott
Mark Leidner finishes reading a poem and takes a slow drink of his wine.
Smack in the middle of a Manhattan poetry reading, a silence builds in the room.
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Like a firestorm and the weather it creates, the poems in this collection occur in an amorphous space where the forms—and the elements with which Savich fills them—are constantly changing.
The Last Usable Hour might be one of our truest examples of serial poetry. Each of the book’s four sequences, and each of the poems that comprise them, stand as individual pieces and as chapters in a developing narrative.
Michael Dickman’s poems inhabit a place in which “morning makes its way up the street as a loose pack of wild dogs” and we find ourselves—through his sharp pronoun use—feeling complicit in acts of violence that are committed in a landscape whose creator we can’t identify.