Who We Thought We Were As We Fell

In his second poetry collection, Michael Lithgow reflects on startling encounters with something elusive, numinous and larger than life amid the material demands and mundane textures of the day-to-day. The poems drift in the tensions between a pleasing life simply lived and disquieting fissures that open in it; between unease with a middle-class backdrop, and surprising if sometimes unsettling moments of beauty to be found there. The poet works through different kinds of grieving for a parent who withers from cancer, for family members murdered in war, for the platforms of death on which common conveniences like grocery stores depend. Weighing harsh realities against promises of life and renewal, Lithgow's poems are the struggle to put into words something that would rather not be named.--