Meditations Before the Windows Fail: Poems

"Meditations before the Windows Fail" contains meditative, lyric poems that address the desire to translate the world into meaning, since it often seems the world is trying to tell us something. What the speaker of the poems discovers is that any meaning must be found in the flesh, not in the world. In a world composed of loss, the human task is two-fold: to both translate the world into meaning, and to turn toward each other when that translation is found to be, as it always is, inadequate. George Looney's poems are deft and intricate in their use of lineation, of unique phrasing, and of the complex use of a fractured, underlying narrative throughout the book.