Every Hour Is Late

Brian Brodeur's Every Hour Is Late achieves an "art that conceals art." These verse-dispatches from deep within Indiana and Ohio offer a feast of poetic forms and genres rare in contemporary American poetry: dramatic monologues, blank verse narratives, Sapphics, tritinas, and rimas dissolutas. Here is a book set firmly in contentious political realities, yet informed by history and myth. Even his private subjects--fatherhood, family, faith -- resonate with the tensions of the current historical moment.

Brodeur’s Every Hour is Late is a deft study of the natural world and new technology, the past and present, and the wonder, or horror, that is the future. The lyricism and rhythm in his use of traditional forms brings life to the beat of a monotonous day or the throbbing pulse of tragedy. Whether writing about Achilles or Amazon’s Alexa, Brodeur reminds us that while the world changes, the pleasures and pains of humanity hold tight in us all.

— Erica Dawson

Anything and everything is on the table in these poems. In half of them, you hear the poet himself talking, and in others, he dons an astonishing array of masks. These voices rise from Brodeur’s pages to sing a hymn of praise to life’s terrible and delicious variety. His poems walk the walk, too, often shuffling along in slant rhymes so subtle that you don’t notice that you’re crossing the line between a thing and its opposite. Seamlessness is the goal here because life and art want desperately to be one entity, not two. Never has this funky world been so yummy.

— David Kirby

Brian Brodeur’s new collection of poems, with its clarity of description, formal ingenuity, grammar of concision, and flexibility across the lines, has the kind of breadth contemporary readers of poetry should crave. His verse is by turns revelatory, moving, troubling, and delightful. Brodeur combines the clear emotional tones of someone like James Wright with the paradoxical wisdom of Robert Frost. The diversity of subject matter in this collection surpasses nearly all of his contemporaries. Each of his poems is a world. The description of water in the poem, “Babble,” its sonic power, rivals even Richard Wilbur. Though the theme of death permeates so much of this collection, I read it with a great sense of joy. This is what the strongest poetry can do.

— John Poch

In singing elegant poems of deep surprise and love for the world, Brian Brodeur’s new collection announces a poet among us to rival Auden in sly formal music and stinging criticism of our time and place. Every Hour is Late is a book of sirens, hymns and warnings where the young Achilles storms along a beach, and elsewhere a father and daughter kneel together quietly talking by a creek, and Bernie Madoff meanwhile murderously thinks. Everyone here is in danger because everyone here is dangerous. These are the poems we need though to protect ourselves. Here is a gorgeous book brimming with urgency and delight, and I bow to the poet with great thanks.

— Steve Scafidi