Obsessed with work and dream, shot through with weather and color, Geoffrey G. O'Brien's spirited debut pursues the possibility of the lyric itself--whether the voice raised "with melodies/and thinking" can be rescued from the ongoing disaster of progress. In roving five-beat lines the poems pass again and again through scenes of liminality--sunset and dawn, falling asleep and waking up, border crossings--searching there for a potential ethics and politics of vision, a mutating, rhythmic "project" to oppose the inert spectacle of guns and flags. Like Ashbery stoked on sonics, O'Brien insists that the restless, unsatisfied motion of thought must hold the place for an ever-decaying freedom within the state.

Yet it is not idea alone that flares "passionately in our lives," but the smell of rain, the behavior of clouds, repetitions of waves: these are the subjects of a meditative ecstasy that advances The Guns and Flags Project as an inheritor of the Stevensian tradition, charged with a sense that history's never-ending storm of restoration and ruin cannot be outmaneuvered but might be withstood, and even revised, by song.

Acknowledgments
The Premiere of Reappearance
Second Shift
Absence of the Archbishop
Solubility
Isabel’s First House
Thoughts of a Judge
Eloign
Early Description
The Sentry-Box
Parts of a House
Tale with a Cascading Moral
Excelsior
Observations on the Florida Question
Reverent Estimations
Palinode
Two Philosophers
Plants Waving in Different Directions
. . . .
In the Idle Style
The Truth in Italy
Standing Before Paintings
Constantly So Near
An Unusual Optimism
Stanzas from Oliveira’s Third Dream
Man Called Aerodynamics
Of a Pressing Nature
A Soldier’s Uniform
The Guestbook
The White Mare Sodality
Notes from the Trial of K.
Vinteuil’s Little Phrase
Blue Rider School
The State’s Only Child
The State’s Only Child
Portrait of the X Family
Invention of Laughter
Second Summer
Omertà
Winter Rose

Geoffrey G. O'Brien's poetry has appeared in many journals, including American Letter & Commentary, The American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Fence, The Iowa Review, and Volt.

"Lyrics of incomparable nuance and density. O'Brien's poetry is demanding but rewarding, transporting the reader to 'the country the city used to be.'"—Library Journal

"A debut book, O'Brien creates incredibly detailed and dream-like narratives that skate along the borders where everyday life filters into anxiety and pain and poetic imagery ultimately triumphs as a kind of meditative yet puzzling joy."—Memphis Commercial Appeal, 4/14