The Hummingbird

The New York School finds new interiority in this collection of poems by turns contemplative, caustic, and wry.

From flower to flower goes the hummingbird, heart pounding, in search of anything sweet. This poet's attention, meanwhile, hovers and darts toward ever-more attenuated spaces of enlivenment and connection in New York City and beyond, filching lyric possibilities from the shadows of indignity and dread. On riverbanks and in dive bars, hospices and deserted libraries, or "in my coffin/reposting mentions," Longabucco's gift is to articulate the specific moment when abjection and edification, shame and satisfaction, banality and profundity tip into one another, only to reveal they were always, inevitably intertwined.