Through branching clauses of off-kilter syntax, Graham Foust makes poetry in Nightingalelessness from the common stuff of conversations, including the ones bouncing around in our heads. “If you think you’ve seen it all you’ve seen one thing.” By observation and direct address, these poems surge forward as a way to retreat and reflect. They concern what Keats calls “the weariness, the fever, and the fret” of adulthood, the weight of time, when the music has stopped. Yet in the syncopation of action against uncertainty, thought against belief, Foust uncovers a wobbly new music.

I heard someone who’d once hurt me
had slipped, had fallen on the stairs
down to Bergen Street station
and broken terribly some vertebrae,
and in my gasping at this fact, my breath
came back, for just an instant, as happiness,
and then I wanted to die from shame, a shame
it seemed could really only be achieved
by way of the end of some world.