Empty Sleeves

From a world tilted a fraction off its axis, these poems speak of angels in Maine and Balinese dinners beneath the Kansas prarie moon. Standing at the interval between the real and surreal, the earthly and eternal, much of Sidney Wade's poetry ponders these intervening spaces, where hunger goes unabated and the air stirs with sighs of exquisite longing. In this collection, language seeks to replicate the world, wresting the soul to all its fluent conjugations--the discourse of insects on the forest floor, the rhetoric of ballroom dancers, the crusty inflections of brushstrokes in an Edward Hopper painting.