Meditations before the Windows Fail contains meditative, lyric poems that address the desire to translate the world into meaning, since it often seems the world is trying to tell us something. What the speaker of the poems discovers is that any meaning must be found in the flesh, not in the world. In a world composed of loss, the human task is two-fold: to both translate the world into meaning, and to turn toward each other when that translation is found to be, as it always is, inadequate. George Looney's poems are deft and intricate in their use of lineation, of unique phrasing, and of the complex use of a fractured, underlying narrative throughout the book.

Meditations Before the Windows Fail: Poems

Literature & Fiction

Looney, George

Poetry

Lost Horse Press

Poetry. Winner of the Red Mountain Poetry Prize. "'Flames, reflected, turn the Thames / a color it will never be again...' These lines from WHAT LIGHT BECOMES: THE TURNER VARIATIONS by George Looney states themes of his tightly woven and brilliantly meditative collection of lyric verse. Each poem refers to a painting of William Turner and each reaches beyond to explore perception, memory, passion, and art. Focus on this 19th century London painter's work allows the poet to delve into mysteries of the elements and transience. Together, all the pieces of the collection create work of a grand master."--Denise Low

What Light Becomes: The Turner Variations (Red Mountain Poetry Prize)

Red Mountain Press

Animals Housed in the Pleasure of Flesh: Poems [Hardcover] [Feb 01, 1996] Looney, George ...

Animals Housed in the Pleasure of Flesh: Poems

Bluestem Pr

Winner of the 2022 Cider Press Review Editors' Prize Book Award. Lola Haskins, author of Asylum: Improvisations on John Clare (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019), writes: "In this collection, Looney dances as if no one were watching as he turns longing, sorrow, and loss into prayer. He has a gift for light--'Everything/bejeweled this morning, as if remembered,' 'this woman's bare shoulder/illumined by a four-in-the-morning moon' --and an ear for birds--wrens, doves and starlings that sing baroque, and for the way, like them, a trapeze artist leaps into thin air. And if that weren't enough, he offers us such seemingly effortless phrases as 'the stink/and nervous ruin of his cigarette,' and 'the rush and stuttering of wings.' Go see the acrobats. You'll be glad you did." "If George Looney's THE ACROBATIC COMPANY OF THE INVISIBLE beautifully offers for our consideration a series of meetings, of light and grass, of figures in a photograph, of instants of space and time, it is above all a study of missed connections, of one awake and one asleep, of distances between word and meaning, the present and the absent, a face and a memory. And yet finally, throughout these poems there is music, there are sparrows, a moon that comes and goes, and the grace to counterbalance loss and departure."--Nancy Eimers, author of Human Figures "George Looney has the uncanny ability to make readers smile while leading them through a valley littered with loss and a longing that 'haunts us more than the dead do.' Wryly observing that 'we keep [the dead] with us, still/and outside time,' Looney offers music as a source of consolation to both the living and the ghosts living among us: 'An ibis calls out this morning,/its song something/both the dead and the living love.' Looney chooses not to succumb to sorrow, and the birds he summons in these achingly beautiful poems become metaphors for faith--'the faith/that lets sparrows leap into air.'--Nancy Naomi Carlson, author of An Infusion of Violets Poetry.

The Acrobatic Company of the Invisible

History & Criticism

Cider Press Review

 A SHORT BESTIARY OF LOVE AND MADNESS, POEMS THAT GIVE VOICE TO THE ANIMAL IN US ALL In verse and in prose, George Looney’s fifth book of poetry, A Short Bestiary of Love and Madness, delves into the worlds of birds and mammals, fish and insects, looking for ways to describe and maybe even understand the various madnesses that love brings.  In the lives of the beasts we find find much hard evidence of loss and despair, but these fables and parables offer, along the way, absolution and, yes, even salvation, of a sort.  “George Looney’s poetry,” novelist and poet Laura Kasischke writes, “resonates at the level of myth and history, evoking a kind of ancient music alongside the details of our contemporary lives the way weather and the human psyche join to make a dream.  This is an important and impressive new collection by one of our most interesting poets.” The poems in this collection create a realm where myth and history come together to form a natural world imbued with meaning, one that allows for the possibility of finding, carved in rock, “a figure that could be divine” (as one of the poems puts it).  In this evocative collection, as “Formed of Burning and Song” puts it, readers will witness a passionate language “etching / the elaborate form of longing in the earth.”

A Short Bestiary of Love and Madness

Stephen F. Austin University Press

It’s summer in a small, Midwestern city, and babies are burning to death in their cribs under odd circumstances. A number of theories are presented by the six narrators of the novel, but the truth of just what is going on is elusive, and it is up to the reader to discover the truth, since one of the underlying issues of the novel is the difference between knowing and believing. In addition to the babies burning in their cribs, there are other types of burning articulated by the six narrators, everything from a mother whose baby was one of the victims surrounding herself with her paintings of flames engulfing buildings and bodies to a widow who is dealing with her own passions released by the death of her husband to a widower who deals with the dead in a very personal manner to a detective becoming obsessed with solving the crime of the burned babies to an adulterer burning with a passion for the married woman he has been having an affair with to a prophet who sees everything that happens around him in terms of the book of Revelation. Metaphorical and real burning is a part of the lives of each of the six narrators of this novel in which music and art are recurring elements, as is the strange miraculous behavior of memory. Memory and music and art, the novel suggests, can reshape the world as well as haunt us and devastate us and, now and then, save us.

Report from a Place of Burning

Literary

Leapfrog Press

From poet George Looney comes a new short story collection that explores the essential nature of faith while plumbing the gritty secrets of the human heart.&nbsp; With swamps, alligators, revival tents, faith healers, sex, death, guilt, sin and snakes, Looney leads us through a dark landscape brimming with the miraculous and the peculiar alike. A man from a fire shows up on someone's doorstep, covered in ash and barely alive. One man's actions make an entire town question its own violence. A healer is bitten in half by an alligator as a crowd looks on. Dripping with Southern gothic, The Visibility of Things Long Submerged gazes at the obscure and obscene.&nbsp; Densely populated with characters that know intimately the trials of life and the restorative powers of love, these stories are filled with a deep longing for something beyond the restless disquiet.&nbsp;

The Visibility of Things Long Submerged (American Reader Series, 39)

Genre Fiction

BOA Editions, Ltd.

Poetry. "I have been a fan of George Looney's poems since before his first book. I know of no other poet who understands so well that regional writing is also a brand of mysticism. This is George Looney's great gift, to show us what was in front of us that we never suspected, 'water dreaming its dust' or 'how birds mimic the horse's mane.' Born of keen eyesight and a turbulent imagination, George Looney's poems do not describe the journey; instead, they become the journey. And the reader is richer for these travels."--Al Maginnes "Like the poetry of Richard Hugo, whom George Looney invokes in so many of his own poems, this is a poetry deeply sad, the landscapes brutal, the images grim. I myself think often of contemporary balladeers such as Richard Thompson and Tom Waits reading this work, turning my mind to all that which we don't expect art to notice, attend to, mourn and celebrate. Looney has given the Midwest back to us in lines so tender and beautiful we can almost believe we are worthy of them."--Kathy Fagan "No one else writes like the inimitable George Looney. His poems read like sestinas in disguise, the same words looping back again and again, strangely unexpected, but dragging along with them their familiar timbre, like a wedding train trailing across a barroom floor and sweeping up peanut shells and ashes. In this collection of new and selected poems, it is fascinating to track the progress of a rare poetic genius as it comes into its full-throated self--but that throat has a lump in it. Sadness is one of the only constants here--the other, brilliance."--Karen Craigo

The Itinerate Circus New and Selected Poems 1995-2020

About the Author\nGeorge Looney is the author of numerous books and chapbooks of poetry, several of which have won national awards, a novel, a novella, and a collection of stories, all three of which won national awards. He is Distinguished Professor of English and Creative Writing at Penn State Erie, The Behrend College, where he has taught for over twenty years and where he founded the BFA in Creative Writing Program. He serves as Editor of the literary journal Lake Effect and Translation Editor of Mid-American Review, and he was co-founder, with the poet Philip Terman, of the original Chautauqua Writers' Festival. His most recent works include ODE TO THE EARTH IN TRANSLATION (Red Mountain Press, 2021), THE WORST MAY BE OVER (Elixir Press, 2020), THE ITINERATE CIRCUS NEW AND SELECTED POEMS 1995-2020 (Red Mountain Press, 2020), and WHAT LIGHT BECOMES: THE TURNER VARIATIONS (Red Mountain Press, 2019).\nPoetry. A new collection from this renowned and prolific poet. "I have always been a fan of George Looney's poetry, and this new collection might be his best yet. He's on constant high alert, noticing what so many of us miss--the beautiful, poignant moments that can lift and sustain us, the moments that leave us wondering and in wonder. Looney, always the empathetic observer, weaves a wistful spell in this compelling collection, one dazzling poem after another. He gets to the hearts of all living things on earth, and to the heart of the earth itself--half moon, half water."--Jim Daniels 
"'The heart is too prone to water damage,' observes George Looney, in this, his eleventh collection of poetry, where the poet takes a deep dive into the myriad ways we can be shipwrecked by the flawed legacy of our humanity. Old age, lost love, death, drunkenness, desire, and even impotence, inhabit these poems like house ghosts we learn to live with, and even dare to love. With gentleness, humor, and unfailing tenderness, these poems take readers on a distinctly Midwestern tour through a world where rust is the coin of the realm and Lake Erie's caprice is a metaphor for life's vicissitudes."--Frank Paino 
"A Midwestern mystic, a rustbelt bard, a poet of mystical insight and existential illumination, George Looney is, to my mind, a rare virtuoso. His poems are full of wit and despair, lyrical beauty and heartbreaking longing, honesty, and hope. He is the kind of poet who can take you to the edge of your consciousness, addressing mortality and loss, and then back home again--or to a bar, a coffee shop, a diner. Reading his work, I feel I am in the presence of a voluminous consciousness and a great heart."--Nin Andrews\nBook Description\nA new collection from this renowned and prolific poet.

Ode to the Earth in Translation

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