god’s breath hovering across the waters

god’s breath hovering across the waters begins with the story of Arthur Penzias’s discovery of the echo of the big bang through a cryogenic microwave receiver and from there explodes into a meditation on the author’s mother’s untimely and tragic death. Memories, history, war, science, horror movies, space exploration, and the RCA dog are just some of the subjects that expand and contract, intersect and repel, throughout the arc of the collection. Praise for previous books: “Such lovely doubts in these poems….These rescues are almost always simply human—a couple making love, a child drawing—as the edge here, the dread, is so humanly complex. This is simultaneously a raw and restrained book. Israeli doesn't spew or explain but remains open to the need so consistently embodied in these poems.” —Bob Hicok “Israeli is visceral and brilliant, intransigent in his doubts. His poems lead deeper into the wilderness—toward the human, the ambivalent, the paradox Dorothy Day called ‘a hard and dreadful love.’’   —D. Nurkse