The Abridged History of Rainfall

Jay Hopler s second collection, a mourning song for his father, is an elegy of uproar, a careening hymn to disaster and its aftermath. In lyric poems by turns droll and desolate, Hopler documents the struggle to live in the face of great loss, a task that sends him ranging through Florida s torrid subtropics, the mountains of the American West, the streets of Rome, and the Umbrian countryside. Vivid, dynamic, unrestrained: "The Abridged History of Rainfall" is a festival of glowing saints and fighting cocks, of firebombs and birdsong."