<div><p>“Keith Althaus has the kind of straightforward voice that commands attention: He makes a series of seemingly calm statements and wham!, you’re hit by the fact that he’s telling the truth, the beautiful truth of what it’s like to be alive right now.”—Alan Dugan</p><p>Keith Althaus published his first book (<i>Rival Heavens</i>, Provincetown Arts Press) in 1993 and has been working in relative obscurity ever since. <i>Ladder of Hours </i>gathers poems written over four decades, a selection that teaches us how insight into everyday life can transform the world. Composed in language that is spare, almost skeletal, yet lacking nothing, <i>Ladder of Hours </i>investigates the subtleties of moments we might otherwise overlook. Althaus is interested in everything, from the label on a whiskey bottle to the distance between emotion and idea. His poems explode “ordinary” moments of perception, revealing unexpected meaning and resonance, and they do so in a way that seems strangely without ego, bent entirely on extracting and capturing the essence of his discoveries. <i>Ladder of Hours </i>takes us into numinous territory we didn’t know was there.</p><p><b><i>Lullaby</i></b></p><p><i>The painful series<br> of operation that<br> culminate in death:<br> becoming forty, eighty,<br> neither one. Dying young<br> or old, awake or drugged,<br> or pleasantly unaware<br> in sleep as they say Auden<br> wanted to and did, with just<br> the slightest sensation,<br> like a sleeping baby<br> handed from one pair of arms<br> into another.</i></p><p><b>Keith Althaus </b>has published poems in <i>The New Yorker</i>, <i>The American Poetry Review</i>, <i>Poetry</i>, and numerous other magazines. He has worked at many jobs, including carpentry, tree planting, loft renovation, and clerical work, and now runs a gallery with his wife, the artist Susan Baker. They live in North Truro, Massachusetts.</p></div> Read Less