The Acrobatic Company of the Invisible

Winner of the 2022 Cider Press Review Editors' Prize Book Award.

Lola Haskins, author of Asylum: Improvisations on John Clare (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019), writes: "In this collection, Looney dances as if no one were watching as he turns longing, sorrow, and loss into prayer. He has a gift for light--'Everything/bejeweled this morning, as if remembered, ' 'this woman's bare shoulder/illumined by a four-in-the-morning moon' --and an ear for birds--wrens, doves and starlings that sing baroque, and for the way, like them, a trapeze artist leaps into thin air. And if that weren't enough, he offers us such seemingly effortless phrases as 'the stink/and nervous ruin of his cigarette, ' and 'the rush and stuttering of wings.' Go see the acrobats. You'll be glad you did."

"If George Looney's THE ACROBATIC COMPANY OF THE INVISIBLE beautifully offers for our consideration a series of meetings, of light and grass, of figures in a photograph, of instants of space and time, it is above all a study of missed connections, of one awake and one asleep, of distances between word and meaning, the present and the absent, a face and a memory. And yet finally, throughout these poems there is music, there are sparrows, a moon that comes and goes, and the grace to counterbalance loss and departure."--Nancy Eimers, author of Human Figures

"George Looney has the uncanny ability to make readers smile while leading them through a valley littered with loss and a longing that 'haunts us more than the dead do.' Wryly observing that 'we keep [the dead] with us, still/and outside time, ' Looney offers music as a source of consolation to both the living and the ghosts living among us: 'An ibis calls out this morning, /its song something/both the dead and the living love.' Looney chooses not to succumb to sorrow, and the birds he summons in these achingly beautiful poems become metaphors for faith--'the faith/that lets sparrows leap into air.'--Nancy Naomi Carlson, author of An Infusion of Violets

Poetry.