Paper Sky

The clouds in Kathleen McGookey's moving prose poems report on a world that's both familiar and uncanny-"Night and day behaved themselves"; "Grandmother and Grandfather have already stepped back into their portraits"; "Dark is dark/ And she is caught in its throat." They illuminate small but crucial moments, and the indistinct things that move at the edge of our peripheral vision. They also reveal the mysteriousness just below the surface of our daily lives, and in doing so transform what we might mistake for the ordinary into art. You'll never see your own life in quite the same way again. -Sharon Bryan