Curves and Angles [Paperback]

Brad Leithauser’s “most satisfying collection in years” (Library Journal), a bracing poetic journey that begins in a warm, peopled world and concludes in a cooler and more private place, embracing love of the human and natural world in all its states.“There’s a down-to-earth wisdom in the way Brad Leithauser sees the transcendent in everyday experience: Instead of trying to make it happen, he lets it happen.” —Katie Peterson, Chicago Tribune

“Why devote oneself to that aggressively minor genre, poetry, when novels and screenplays and tell-all memoirs get more notice and make more money? Brad Leithauser answers that question in Curves and Angles.” —The New York Times Book ReviewBrad Leithauser is the author of five previous books of poetry, five novels, a book of essays, and a novel in verse. After many years of teaching at Mount Holyoke College, he is now a professor in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. He and his wife, the poet Mary Jo Salter, divide their time between Amherst, Massachusetts, and Baltimore, Maryland.NOT LUNAR EXACTLY
(Detroit, 1948)


New, and entirely new to the neighborhoodÉ
One August day, it came to their own street:
the Nutleys brought home a television!
Nights now, the neighbors began to meet
more often than before, out walking,
walking past the Nutleys, who, on display
behind their picture window, sat frozen
in their chairs, watching their television, which lay
off to the side, just out of view,
so you couldn’t make out what
it was they were watching but only
them watching,lc�