Out West

A new collection from Chicago poet Michael O'Leary.Second collection of poems by Michael O'Leary.A new collection from Chicago poet Michael O'Leary."'First night, heading out west /pulled in late to a roadside motel in the middle of Missouri.' So begins Michael O'Leary's 'temporary exile' to the central coast of California. Captivated by a new and unfamiliar landscape, and imprisoned 'in the dark between /unknowing and knowing my way back home . . .' O'Leary explores the place where 'Ideas reach /into the deep but go no further than words allow.' There, miraculously, at the seeming limit of expression, the poems in this extraordinary collection take flight. Inspired by solitude, longing and memory, O'Leary crosses into a new frontier, a place where 'Only the mind can know the blue /of the sea and infer traject- ories /of light from ideas of beauty.' Probing, restless, bursting with energy and oracular insight, OUT WEST reinterprets the monumental metaphor of the west for a new generation navigating an anxious era."--Patrick LohierPoetry.