Spooky Action

by John Mulrooney

"John Mulrooney's Spooky Action takes us on a high-velocity, free-associational journey through our times. These poems arise out of a capacious imagination determined to meet and keep in mind whatever the world delivers, to make a music out of what is. Sometimes the world offers the poet an evanescent beauty, as when, for example, he sees a gust of snow that "plumes angelic" over a city street. But more often the world confronts him, and us, with no small amount of lies, myopias, loss, and suffering. Mulrooney's poems follow our difficult human trail wherever it leads, and in the process, he widens and deepens our sense of the real, which is of course why poetry matters, and this poetry definitely matters."--Fred Marchant "The delicate imprint of a bicycle tread is what these poems look like and read like. They are magical as they avoid every unwanted impediment and make room for Mulrooney the poet. When the wheels stop spinning, they leave a whirl of words that settle into place for even a ghost to enjoy."--Fanny Howe "Einstein spoke dismissively of "spooky action at distance," the idea that separate objects could somehow share a simultaneous condition across space and time, or what is sometimes referred to as quantum entanglement. Yet the phrase persists and serves as a powerful metaphor for the work poetry does. In John Mulrooney's amazing new book, lyric performs this entanglement, bridging distant states of mind and registers of experience with a swiftness and a surprise that is indeed spooky.… The suffering and loss of this world haunts these poems with an elemental pathos, the power of a fading logos written in the language of ghosts who still speak out of the dark in a human voice."--Patrick Pritchett Poetry.

124 pages, Paperback

Published June 28, 2023

Reviews

[Ally]

bless me
bless you did I sin
no I sneezed

-- "Cantata Under Parker's Statue"
---
we were waiting to
find the way to cross
that parking lot
learning to want to
cross it like the first
mariners did on shore

-- "All Conjunctions Aspire to Greatness"
---
we desire to both want and be
until memory strikes a pose

and crosses over the borderline
of our love

-- "Poem on Madonna's Birthday"
---
[There's a printing error where the top line of a poem continuing from the previous page is typeset as a new poem title, leading to a neat moment of dislocation: the previous page ends mid sentence & then there's a whole new poem that only after a moment do you realize can continue the previous one. When would it be cool to do this on purpose?]