Calendar Year - Hardcover

The title of Julie Agoos' book Calendar Year is taken from one of the four longer works that make up this collection: these five or six lines/once sketched on the leatherbound notepad; your signature -- / a backwards ghost; the fingerprints/ that had belonged to you/ are bodiless and painful/ as an idea/ just out of grasp (from the final lines of the title section). Abandonment relates a similar concern for the intangibility and temporality of being: and last, the black vase sheer and difficult/that stinks of its own reason: we are temporal./ Every inward chance/ breaks free of us.

JULIE AGOOS won the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition for her book Above the Land. She has taught at John Hopkins and Princeton University, and currently teaches in the Department of English at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York.