Poetry. Aaron McCollough's fifth book, UNDERLIGHT, is a dialogue of selves progressing through the Moebius turns of innocence and experience, materiality and faith, despair and reason. UNDERLIGHT is a lyric inquiry into the problems of being and community. It opens itself gradually outward to embrace complication but also accountability as redemptive virtues in a life always on the brink of nihilism.

Aaron McCollough's poetry is a living system that is one part the assaulted world and one part the world's conscious surveyor. In UNDERLIGHT 'a private sorrow drapes' revealing an ecology of disappointment where the poet reports 'hearing at least feels like holding and where else does it go.' While the music here plumbs various shapes a final hour can take, it also insists we should never agree to an end without first having our most heartfelt say, 'Making love, we used the dark for leverage.' UNDERLIGHT is full of such impossible machines all doing emergency work.--Peter Richards