Who We Thought We Were As We Fell

In this second poetry collection by Michael Lithgow, intimations of something numinous and larger than life jostle with the material demands of the everyday, sparking an uncertainty about what lurks at the edges of things, if anything at all. The poems drift in the tension between a pleasing suburban life simply lived and unsettling moments that pull against it, intrusions of the surreal.

Civic uncertainty in the wilderness gives way to more intimate modes of circumspection, a working-through of different kinds of grieving – for a parent who withers from cancer, for family members murdered in war, for the platforms of death on which common conveniences like grocery stores depend.

The poems weigh harsh realities against promises of life and renewal, struggling to put into words something that would rather not be named. They are a thought-provoking meditation on being haunted by darker and more beautiful shadows than are apparent on a life's face level.