Winner of the first Grolier Discovery Award
In the haze of an American exile’s intoxicated fantasia, Incommunicado’s lyrically lush lines evoke the at once festive and melancholy atmosphere of an unnamed Mexican village before and after the annual Carnaval revels. Together an old street singer, young bullfighter, and disaffected foreigner join the resident waitress, flamenca, and flower girl in an elaborate, incantatory dance of running bulls and rippling scarves, of sangria-soaked orange peels and absinthe-tinted confetti strips, around the local arena, café, and fountain as the scattered pages of a last letter home blow away in the breeze.
“Keith O’Shaughnessy has composed Incommunicado with extraordinary thoroughness. Sensuous images, swelling syntax, and haunting recurrences are here organized into a set of varied patterns at once intricate, gorgeous, and rigid. Incommunicado arranges its paradoxical shards—art, appetite, beauty, decay—into a lush and austere design. I know of no book like it.”
Rachel Hadas
Writer & Guggenheim Foundation fellow
“Incommunicado, yes. But not in the way one might first guess. The poems in Keith O’Shaughnessy’s collection are . . . accessible and memorable, full of vivid images . . . These are poems—in the tradition of Augustine, Lao Tzu, Christian mystics, Zen—about the ineffable, that which must be spoken to but cannot be spoken of.”
H. L. Hix
Writer & Winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize
“Keith O’Shaughnessy’s book of poems Incommunicado is a marvel of craft and passion . . . These poems are bold, they are well made, and they dare the reader to drop everything and join the dance.”
Ifeanyi Menkiti
Late Owner of the Grolier Poetry Book Shop in Harvard Square