Sleeping Through the Graveyard Shift

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Like songs on an old record, Al Maginnes' Sleeping Through the Graveyard Shift has the feel of revelation and a call to arms after revelation. They are the captain's log of one who sees past shape-shifting triumph. One after another, these generous-spirited poems treat the reader like a complicit friend, like an accomplice or confederate, a coworker-partner who has learned the skill of seeing what needs to be accomplished. The windfall change Maginnes spends on jukeboxes and pinball in 'The Day Patty Hearst Was Captured' is currency and passport to a country both fearsome and fervently personal, an America of joy and disappointment and shit-wage transactions that, nonetheless, seem to have the power to redeem. This book is stunning for its many revelations, as in the poem 'Vulture Skull, ' where we hear of a 'dark / that hosts both what is foul in us / and any spark of infinity we might own' or in the magnificent final poem 'Hard Luck: A Requiem for Jerry Quarry'-gem-like, the poems open the heart-eye in rooms of light and living shadows. Of course there is music playing. Always-and-forever music."-Roy Bentley, finalist for the Miller Williams Poetry Prize for Walking with Eve in the Loved City