The Oval Hour

In  The Oval Hour  Kathleen Peirce addresses the vulnerability of language—which is to say the vulnerability of our reality—when we are in extreme states of desire and loss, especially erotic desire and erotic loss. Central to the book is its series of "Confessions," twenty formally similar poems that contend with the  Confessions of Saint Augustine. “Passing through innocence, I came either to experience / or guilt, or they came to me, displacing innocence”: these luminous poems