Published 2025. Paperback, 9 x 6 ins, 184pp, £14.95 / $23
ISBN 9781848619838 [Download a sampler from this volume here]


“Portent cut with some oblique, demanding order of promise quickens the complex, unsecured ground Joseph Donahue ventures onto. He himself says it best, I think: “I sift / through manias, rigors, lapses. I hunger/ to inhabit a living form.” Or: “Nothing now but the untold./ The core/ The hidden voices/ The warring/ & rhapsodic/ gods.” The triggered squint this confers on the reader resuscitates while reconceiving what would once have been called vision. The ancestral, vatic world is here, but so, more insistently in fact, is our profane present, battening on its denials, dense with menace and a mired appetite for light. The rich weave and exacting reach of this work are astounding.” —Nathaniel Mackey

“Joseph Donahue's poetry is a phantasmagoria of the real in which Jack Ruby collides with Apollo and new mythologies coalesce amid flying bullets and intercepted video loops. We move as if in a dream shot through with beauty and terror only to discover that we have been wide awake all along, that this is indeed our own world.” —Geoffrey O'Brien

“Joseph Donahue speculates on our own dark past, insistent present, and troubling future. In “Oswald at the Window”, he shows us “the assassin creating the void in which the images shine.” Donahue takes us on a tour through this landscape, where the images have names and are mounted on ancient Egyptian billboards. The legions of the living shake hands with legions of the dead. The voices of their greetings, messages, and personal ads resonate through these works.” —John Yau

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