Sky Harbor

"One might slip into a cave without a torch and imagine a language of foot scuttle and wing whinny, imagine that one must make from these consonants and vowels a lyric, a metaphysics-such is the poetry of Miles Waggener-hermetic, intentional, and of great necessity."-SANDRA ALCOSSER, Author of A Fish to Feed All Hunger and Except by Nature

"'Sky Harbor' is the name of Phoenix, Arizona's international airport, through whose automatic sliding doors-at one point in this fabulous collection of the same name-a sparrow flies. The human-constructed and the unconstructed abut constantly in Miles Waggener's second full-length collection, wherein collisions between desert landscape and air-conditioned condominium developments form a stimulating dynamic, and an indelible backdrop on which the poet's major concerns-memory, the land's impression on the psyche, logos, spiritual longing-unfold, to distinct and brilliant consequence. When all the clique-ish whisperings cease, we will come to poetry like Miles Waggener's Sky Harbor to regain a sense of what the genre can truly do. Rigorous and rewarding, brimful of craft and passion, this book emanates from a place-in the physical landscape and in the landscape of the mind-that is both longed for and exquisitely evoked. These poems shine the reader 'through the lock's narrow way.'"-CHRIS DOMBROWSKI, Author of By Cold Water

"Enter an earth dark with portents, some of which we have created ourselves: bird dead from a boy's rock, fetus unable to come to term. In this uncannily orchestrated book of poems, the earth, our familiar, is given back to us strange, a landscape caught between the violence of the past and impending apocalypse, where we, as humans, exist between danger and domain. Miles Waggener has written a narrative of last days in a language that staggers, turning corners, sometimes perilously, in a search for doors, gates, horizons which will open, 'the last-ditch efforts in the inclement that you, that your children become.' Read this book slowly; it is as breathtaking and suspenseful as our time here."-MELISSA KWASNY, Author of The Nine Senses