Museum Hours by Michael Kelleher

Museum Hours, Michael Kelleher’s first published collection of poems since 2007, is comprised of four sections imagined as rooms in a museum with “bright white walls./Infinitely tall.” The museum is a kind of memory palace, where images impress themselves on the mind with indelible force. The reader of Museum Hours is asked not so much to read these poems as to “inhabit and wander through” them, “Endlessly. Endlessly.”

“The poems in Michael Kelleher’s new book, Museum Hours, are by turns clever, moving, haunting, artful, and always well constructed. Whether it is a witty list-poem ‘Nature Mort’, or a prose-poem ‘Weather Report’, or the wonderful seventeen-part heliotropic long-poem set up as tightly wrought quintets — the poetry always soars. To savour them, one must return to them again and again, gently soaking in the art.”

—Sudeep Sen, author of EroText (Penguin Random House) & the editor of The HarperCollins Book of English Poetry

“Attraction has its pulls,” writes Michael Kelleher. Museum Hours maps, in moving ways, the force of gravity that art has on our lives, our attentions. One trusts the secrets that Kelleher’s poems share. With their precision, their quietness, their frequently keen but subtle wit, these poems enter the ear and the mind as intimately as a sudden sense of wonder just before “the roof gives way to the stars.”

—Richard Deming, Yale University

Michael Kelleher is the director of the Windham-Campbell Literature Prizes at Yale University. He formerly served as Artistic and Associate Director of Just Buffalo Literary Center in Buffalo, New York, where he founded Babel, an international lecture series in which he interviewed authors such as V. S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie and Zadie Smith.

His published collections of poetry include Museum Hours (BlazeVOX, 2016), Human Scale (BlazeVOX, 2007), and To Be Sung (BlazeVOX, 2004). His poems and essays have appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, Colorado Review, the Poetry Foundation Website, Sentence: A Journal of Prose Poetics, ecopoetics, The Poetry Project Newsletter, The Queen St. Quarterly, Slope, and others.

From 2008-13 he produced a blog project entitled “Aimless Reading,” in which he documented the more than 1,200 books in his personal library.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 102 pages

· Binding: Perfect-Bound

· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] 

· ISBN: 978-1-60964-243-3

$16

Museum Hours by Michael Kel… by Geoffrey Gatza