<p>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</p><p></p><p>SAMPLE POEM:</p><p><span style="background-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 1)">Poem After Solstice</span></p><p><span style="background-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 1)">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;</span><em style="background-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 1)">for John Wieners</em></p><p><span style="background-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 1)">A storm is&nbsp;</span></p><p><span style="background-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 1)">a rhetorical device,</span></p><p><span style="background-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 1)">a retrieval of lost syllables,</span></p><p><span style="background-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 1)">rain foils the foliage to be</span></p><p><span style="background-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 1)">and it's got something up&nbsp;</span></p><p><span style="background-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 1)">my sleeve.</span></p><p><span style="background-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 1)">The year I was born</span></p><p><span style="background-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 1)">a god sauntered down the boardwalk</span></p><p><span style="background-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 1)">on Revere Beach and stole your girl</span></p><p><span style="background-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 1)">with his stare.</span></p><p><span style="background-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 1)">I retained nothing I stared at</span></p><p><span style="background-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 1)">that year or the next</span></p><p><span style="background-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 1)">although it's likely most&nbsp;</span></p><p><span style="background-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 1)">of what I did&nbsp;</span></p><p><span style="background-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 1)">was stare;</span></p><p><span style="background-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 1)">an impregnable embrace of the world&nbsp;</span></p><p><span style="background-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 1)">that those around me probably called wonder.</span></p><p><span style="background-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 1)">The first propriety squandered.</span></p><p></p>