The Language of Phosphorescence

The poems in this collection examine the individual's relationship with place and an evolving concept of "home"-home in the geographic and ecological sense, and home as it relates to the passage of time and the spiritual separation of body and soul.

More than the pleasurable strength of lovely, lyrical lines, Jeff Grieneisen delves into the absolute depth of themes ("Who heard the word / that began Everything"), encompassing origins, ancestry, braids of causality producing living identities, relations of history, all becoming a world we enjoy experiencing, all of it that matters. He shows us where words "lead to the earth." That's a great gift in a book of poetry.

-Nicholas Samaras, author of Hands of the Saddlemaker; and American Psalm, World Psalm

Jeff Grieneisen is intimate and intense in his poems-he generously lets us move through his personal history as a human being on earth, with his people, his loves, his body. Yet, as we meander through this house of leaves expecting sketched stories, chance insights, and the magic of memory, we fi nd something much more defi nite and permanent: a poet's truth, an eccentric personage of many faces passing a doorway or sitting in a chair by the window. I imagine him half hidden among words as by a cloak and hat; he allows us patiently to come near and reverently pay him homage in moments of contemplation and wonder.

-Roxana Preda, University of Edinburgh