Phantom Hour (The New Series, 73)

Poetry. In two long-form poems, PHANTOM HOUR examines the elegiac importance of memory and lineage, both poetic and genealogical, as a mode of reclaiming a father's narrative lost to dementia by embracing the incantatory and reanimating power of the sustained lyric project. The book builds on the idea that history is reliant upon memory and mythopoesis—how we mythologize our own stories. Interweaving threads of family history, the navigation of complex personal relationships, and an investigation into the causes and effects of dementia, PHANTOM HOUR explores the erasure and reclamation of memory's narrative and the mythology a son constructs around his father. It is Meetze's most personal and most project-oriented work yet. "In PHANTOM HOUR, his third full- length collection of poetry, James Meetze continues his brutal investigation of metaphysics, following thoughts in mesmerizing lines of poetry as if doing so might indeed lead to meaning beyond musings. The goal of this particular book, though, is to understand whether the image or the memory of the image is more valuable, and to do so without being sidetracked by the foreboding sense that there may be no value at all. Or as Meetze himself puts it, 'There is no quick brown fox to jump / over anything. / I've been outfoxed. / I'm waiting for something to arrive / in the phantom hour.' This is a brilliantly philosophical collection of stunning long-form poems. I wish I had written it." —Jericho Brown, author of The New Testament