At Times

Praise

“Brooke Horvath writes with just enough heart and just enough wit to strike a balance that allows him to tell the two human stories at once. At Times is a generous gathering of tightly focused, smart, sensitive poems.” —Billy Collins, author of The Rain in Portugal

“I’ve known and admired the poems of Brooke Horvath for many years, drawn to their quietly profound music, the language keyed so aptly to the sad, the sensuous and often exhilarating music of our lives. This astonishing collection reveals the surprising range of his work, an expansive landscape of moments that arise from close observation of the deeply human world he not only inhabits but invents. I’ll return to these poems again and again—that’s without question.” —Jay Parini, author of New and Collected Poems, 1975-2015

“Reading Brooke Horvath’s At Times: New and Selected Poems is like leafing through a family album. The line that opens “Christmas Morning”—“I turn again to old photographs”—could serve as an epigraph to the book. Memory drives these poems, from a rare day of contentment to times of anguish and anger (a daughter with Down’s Syndrome, divorce, the deaths of loved ones). What keeps the poems from collapsing into darkness is Horvath’s irreverent wit and learning lightly worn, in a language that can be playful but is always direct. As he says in a couplet from “Prejudice,” he likes a poet “who lays down words like bricks in a row / and never says what he doesn’t know.” At Times feels like more than a book: it’s a life set down solidly in words.” –Elton Glaser, author of The Law of Falling Bodies