“This extraordinary and sobering debut begins with a literal stutter—‘Since I couldn't say tomorrow / I said Wednesday.’ In trade for this impediment, Adam Giannelli finds that, in poetry, what can’t be said gives way to what must be said.”—Craig Morgan Teicher, judge, Iowa Poetry Prize

“Adam Giannelli talks to the world—to rain, to insomnia, to the beloveds here and vanished, to the stars themselves in their ‘old staring contest.’ Sink into this book as into solace and trouble. ‘Am I lost / or have I been lifted?’ the poet asks. Answer: happily for us, both.”—Marianne Boruch, author, Eventually One Dreams the Real Thing

“Rilke meets Roethke in the beveled moptops of a hydrangea, a basketball net’s ‘punctured sieve,’ a rogue porcupine (‘quilled, in dark makeup, like the bass player / in an 80s band’), all transformed, in Giannelli’s scrupulous, sonically lavish articulation, into emblems of the unspeakable mystery inside every syllable. Inside us.”—Lisa Russ Spaar, author, Orexia: Poems

“In this stunning debut collection, the observations of an often-solitary speaker explode in dazzling metaphors, unexpected juxtapositions, and challenging insights. Elegy becomes explicit as the book progresses, met in the final sections by poems of relationship. But the note of loss remains: ‘What we’ve lost swims / under the surface of mirrors’—and in these extraordinary poems.”—Martha Collins, author, Admit One: An American Scrapbook