The Oval Hour (Iowa Poetry Prize)

In The Oval Hour Kathleen Peirce addresses the vulnerability of language -- which is to say the vulnerability of our reality -- when we are in extreme states of desire and loss, especially erotic desire and erotic loss. Central to the book is its series of "Confessions, " twenty formally similar poems that contend with the Confessions of Saint Augustine. "Passing through innocence, I came either to experience / or guilt, or they came to me, displacing innocence": these luminous poems explore the generation and overlapping of carnal and metaphysical identities.