At Some Point (Wisconsin Poetry Series)

At Some Point (Wisconsin Poetry Series)

Time is slippery. At Some Point openly acknowledges this while exploring the intersections between past and present, childhood and adulthood, midlife and mortality. Joyously and solemnly tugging on the threads that connect us—to life, to the planet, to each other—David O’Connell finds meaning in the small things. An earworm, a sudden memory, the arrival of a fox in the neighborhood, even camaraderie among other patients awaiting colonoscopies—all are grist for O’Connell’s ability to view the world simultaneously anew and as it once appeared. From the quotidian to the profound, this is a collection that hovers around your consciousness, reshaping your own vision and insight. “Plain-spoken, warm, and affectionate poems give way to deeper observation as O’Connell turns a wry eye on finitude and mortality. These poems never leave us behind, embracing a world in which even a ‘lummox’ (like us) can be ‘gobsmacked’ by ‘so many choices’ that ‘the whole universe seemed possible.’ This is a capacious and big-hearted book.” -- Ronald Wallace, judge, Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry “Marvelous. Delicate, durable, intimate in feeling, and sweeping in view, At Some Point rewards belief in an American poetry that wants to ravel language, that’s keen to the mesmeric, that recognizes awe can be located in the everyday. Poems like these are what happens when grace and intelligence decide to take a walk.” -- Colin Channer, Rhode Island Poet Laureate “Consistently spare, precise, and thoughtful, these poems are, above all, intimate. Subjects are not merely observed but experienced and meditated upon until loneliness, joy, and grief are, as O’Connell writes, ‘observed as passing clouds, an innate meteorology.’” -- Gary Fincke David O’Connell’s poetry collections include At Some Point ,  Our Best Defense,  and the chapbook A Better Way to Fall . His work has appeared in New Ohio Review , Ploughshares , Cincinnati Review , Southern Poetry Review , and North American Review , among other journals. O’Connell lives in Rhode Island with his wife, the poet Julie Danho, and their daughter. His work can be found at davidoconnellpoet.com. “Unable to carry their overloaded backpacks, my daughter and her friends wheel them to school like battered airline luggage, struggling to pull them along their shortcut through the cemetery. As they cross, she tells me, they’ll each, out loud, say I'm sorry , though she’s not sure who started this, and, pressed, rolls her eyes, embarrassed to admit the reasons they do.” —Excerpt from “Intervale Cemetery”