The poems of Lawrence Joseph's Precisely Now unspool against the backdrop of a transmogrified Lower Manhattan, one built back after 9/11, yet where buildings on Wall Street remain pockmarked from anarchist bombings of the 1920s. Out on the very tip of the island, where “moods are painted blue on the blue East River,” on the streets where Federico García Lorca walked on his American tour, where Herman Melville was born, and where emblems of American avarice burn bright, we find the poet witnessing the suffering around him, seeking to find a simple and timeless language to describe the present as it happens.
With an incisive intelligence, a pervading dignity, and a keen sense of humanity, Joseph writes unsparingly of the detritus of the Trump presidency, the sins of our nation, the horrors of genocide, and the decline of the body. These poems—challenging, direct, fierce in intensity yet beating with sensuous intimacy—seek to uncover the soul.
"Joseph has a sensitive eye and an even more sensitive ear, and he's spent years observing how America looks and sounds. . . The book registers what it's like to live at this precise, exact moment, and it does so through the precision and exactness of its language. Precisely Now is about the world; all great poetry is."
