The Night Chorus

A whistling through teeth. / He shuts his eyes but still sees / the red glow of exit signs.

Harold Hoefle's The Night Chorus rises out of forests and country roads, bars and buses, cities and small towns. These locales are the haunts of outsiders ranging from travellers and farmers to a soldier, a drug addict, a refugee, and the murdered. The past clings in these stark, evocative poems, "memory a closet of clothes / that hang from bent wire."

In the tradition of songwriters like Gordon Lightf...