George Looney

From poet George Looney comes a new short story collection that explores the essential nature of faith while plumbing the gritty secrets of the human heart. With swamps, alligators, revival tents, faith healers, sex, death, guilt, sin and snakes, Looney leads us through a dark landscape brimming with the miraculous and the peculiar alike. A man from a fire shows up on someone's doorstep, covered in ash and barely alive. One man’s actions make an entire town question its own violence. A healer is bitten in half by an alligator as a crowd looks on. Dripping with Southern gothic, The Visibility of Things Long Submerged gazes at the obscure and obscene. Densely populated with characters that know intimately the trials of life and the restorative powers of love, these stories are filled with a deep longing for something beyond the restless disquiet.

After Douglas Smith and George Looney graduated from Bowling Green State University with their MFA degrees, Douglas' in fiction and George's in poetry, they never lived in the same city again. They visited one another when they could, met at AWP Conferences when both could get funding from the educational institutions they were working at, and they spent time over two different summers in Austin, Texas researching the William Goyen special issue of Mid-American Review. And they sent letters back and forth through the US mail. These poems started out as those letters. At some point they decided to work with a particular series of those letters, to hone them into poems, and to create this chapbook of corresponding poems. Sadly, Douglas did not live to see it in print.

It's summer in a small, Midwestern city, and babies are burning to death in their cribs under odd circumstances. A number of theories are presented by the six narrators of the novel, but the truth of just what is going on is elusive, and it is up to the reader to discover the truth, since one of the underlying issues of the novel is the difference between knowing and believing. In addition to the babies burning in their cribs, there are other types of burning articulated by the six narrators, everything from a mother whose baby was one of the victims surrounding herself with her paintings of flames engulfing buildings and bodies to a widow who is dealing with her own passions released by the death of her husband to a widower who deals with the dead in a very personal manner to a detective becoming obsessed with solving the crime of the burned babies to an adulterer burning with a passion for the married woman he has been having an affair with to a prophet who sees everything that happens around him in terms of the book of Revelation. Metaphorical and real burning is a part of the lives of each of the six narrators of this novel in which music and art are recurring elements, as is the strange miraculous behavior of memory. Memory and music and art, the novel suggests, can reshape the world as well as haunt us and devastate us and, now and then, save us.

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.

A SHORT BESTIARY OF LOVE AND MADNESS, POEMS THAT GIVE VOICE TO THE ANIMAL IN US ALL In verse and in prose, George Looney's fifth book of poetry, A Short Bestiary of Love and Madness, delves into the worlds of birds and mammals, fish and insects, looking for ways to describe and maybe even understand the various madnesses that love brings. In the lives of the beasts we find find much hard evidence of loss and despair, but these fables and parables offer, along the way, absolution and, yes, even salvation, of a sort. 'George Looney's poetry,' novelist and poet Laura Kasischke writes, 'resonates at the level of myth and history, evoking a kind of ancient music alongside the details of our contemporary lives the way weather and the human psyche join to make a dream. This is an important and impressive new collection by one of our most interesting poets.'The poems in this collection create a realm where myth and history come together to form a natural world imbued with meaning, one that allows for the possibility of finding, carved in rock, 'a figure that could be divine' (as one of the poems puts it). Here, in the mundane habits of fish and fowl and mammal and insect, the poems find, inscribed, an elegant language that pronounces the passions we need to claim as ours in order to remain human. 'A Short Bestiary of Love and Madness,' poet Malena Mörling has written, 'is a beautiful and wondrous book chock full of fantastic poems - poems of crocodiles, ghosts, sea robins and angels. Here the magic of the familiar and the mystery of the unseen are seamlessly and lyrically celebrated. This is an inspired and original book.' In this evocative collection, as 'Formed of Burning and Song' puts it, readers will witness a passionate language 'etching / the elaborate form of longing in the earth.'