To Keep Time

Joseph Massey’s third collection, To Keep Time, limns the microclimate of coastal Humboldt County, California. These poems live where modern life—radio static, a space heater, traffic—collides with the so-called natural world. With spare, vivid imagery, Massey builds brilliantly on concerns familiar to readers of his earlier works. Here “The near-silence / rattles me // to attention;” here the vagaries of language itself—what’s been left out as much as what’s been written in—penetrate the heart of these stealthy, aching poems. To Keep Time stops the world’s chatter for a moment and listens to its loneliness and longing, and hears the grace in the relentlessness of days.