Precisely Now: Poems

A new, impassioned, ultracontemporary collection from “one of our most acute poetic chroniclers” (The New York Times).

Precisely Now unspools against the backdrop of a transmogrified Lower Manhattan, one built back after 9/11, yet where buildings on Wall Street remain pockmarked from anarchist bombings of the 1920s. Out on the very tip of the island, where “moods are painted blue on the blue East River,” on the streets where Federico García Lorca walked on his American tour, where Herman Melville was born, and where emblems of American avarice burn bright, we find the poet seeking to transform what he sees, thinks, and feels into a simple and timeless language describing the present as it happens.

With an incisive intelligence, a pervading dignity, and keen sense of humanity and beauty, Joseph writes unsparingly of the detritus of the Trump presidency, the sins of our nation, the horrors of genocide, and the decline of the body. Challenging, direct, morally focused, fierce in intensity, ultracontemporary yet beating with a sensuous intimacy that has at its core an abiding love, Precisely Now presents a vision as bold and impassioned as any in American poetry.