Small Hours

"Ilyse Kusnetz's Small Hours is a 'ministry of dreams' preserving what is 'not visible, but felt, ' the 'ghostly firmament' of the flesh, and in our very bones, the immanent flight concealed within us. Meanwhile the poet keeps watch over 'disassembled countries, ' preserving 'lost narratives, postcards from the dead, ' and the memory of those about whom 'we know almost nothing.' She calls forth monarchs, match girls, and astronomers, offers prescriptions for curing the plague, visits 'Hitler's childhood room preserved' and the cockpit of the Enola Gay, and shows us kamikaze pilots smiling from their last photographs. In this radiant mosaic shot through with chips of historical time, Kusnetz takes flight as do her 'white herons rising into the dark, ' and if the world she surveys is wounded, her poems 'sing into the wound' as a healer would sing. This is poetry of deep and compassionate intelligence." -Carolyn Forché