Bottled Air

by Caleb Klaces

Drawing history into the present, and bringing the distant near, these poems bring Chinese caves together with sleepwalkers in locked office blocks, Texan bird experts with the NHS, one night stands with sacrificial cats, and Antarctic explorers with the threat of suicide at a London bus stop. An investigation in four parts, Bottled Air includes travel lyrics and elegies for new discoveries, a short story in verse, love poems of seventeenth century prose filtered through email, and wayward notes. But it is a unified work, itself preoccupied with how the parts of a life might possibly make sense with one another, and with seeing what sustains, and threatens, the air.

80 pages, Hardcover

First published April 24, 2013