Church of the Adagio

Poetry. "Reading Philip Dacey's poems is like having a conversation with a funny, sophisticated, and insightful friend. You're laughing, you're nodding in appreciation, you're saying, 'A-ha. I never saw things that way, but wow—you're right.' And you don't want to say goodbye anytime soon. Like the best literature, Dacey's poems teach us—or remind us—what it means to be human. They speak of our capacity for reverence ('Guest of Honor') as well as our ability to wound ('Neighborly'); they address our ability to conjure beauty via art, performance, and music ('Nijinsky: A Sestina,' among others) and our power to destroy ('At the Hiroshima Photo Exhibit'); they evoke our ingenuity (all of Dacey's poems themselves as well as some of their subjects) and, simultaneously, as in 'The Hike (Altea, Spain),' our frailty and our resilience."—Mark Brazaitis