Books by Joseph Massey

"Observant, musical, coheres to nature; it's been a pleasure to read Joseph Massey for some years now. A poetry pared down to the essential inside the world where language interacts with itself and becomes the landscape it emerges from." -Tom Pickard

Back in print in this new, revised edition featuring pieces that did not appear in the original, Joseph Massey's Illocality is a revelation of season and setting. In an ironic turn against the collection's title, his poems are all about place, all about the immediacy of the moment. His poems focus on details as small as, "A diseased shrub // [absorbing] / the leftover glow" to bring us a rendering of the beautiful chaos around us which reflects a chaos within. His work has been called a "poetry of the environment," and indeed, while "December / reverberates with decay," in the end the speaker lives life "condensed. . . to forsythia's / rhythm."

In his new chapbook, Present Conditions, Joseph Massey writes that "the weather within / is the weather without." His poems chronicle a difficult winter where the universe grows colder, his speaker taking all day to "filter out the debris of a dream." These poems bring us the aching beauty of the natural world, and the crushing sadness of interior space. A speaker's failed suicide. The return to sanity. The waiting where we can't go on, but we do go on, if nothing else when "the windows / . . . go blind."

In 'At the Point', Joseph Massey's second full-length collection of poems, memory gives way to edges and angles, to "Sound heaped/on sound," to spaces that "make the shade/tangible" as words arrange a place for the actual.

Spare, vivid lyrics on the microclimate of coastal California