Synopsis "Sleeping Through the Graveyard Shift"
“Like the workers in his poems - graveyard waitresses, steel men, hot tar roofers - ‘whose art is perseverance,’ Maginnes the poet always shows up. In poems where a trimmed fingernail means more than the moon, he casts a wary eye on America, but never disowns it. Tempted, he never quite surrenders to pessimism, always just beating the count, rising to the ‘voice willing itself to go on,’ punching the Poetry card. His ‘people’ may be ‘projects / half-finished,’ but he knows that ‘monuments rise on the foundations / of failures.’ Refusing to believe that ‘any love is wrong,’ he’s Levine-like, a laureate of the lowly, the everyday, and now of late middle-age; a poet who, like his Whitman, finds ‘the breaking apart fragments of a universe still beautiful in its mystery.’ These are poems you can believe in, you can trust. Poems that are use-full, that can humbly help us ‘bear the scars of a day’s demands.’ There is not much more you can ask of poetry, than that.” —Adrian Rice, author of Hickory Station, and The Strange Estate: New & Selected Poems 1986-2017.“Like songs on an old record, Al Maginnes’ Sleeping Through the Graveyard Shift has the feel of revelation and a call to arms after revelation. They are the captain’s log of one who sees past shape-shifting triumph. One after another, these generous-spirited poems treat the reader like a complicit friend, like an accomplice or confederate, a coworker-partner who has learned the skill of seeing what needs to be accomplished. The windfall change Maginnes spends on jukeboxes and pinball in ‘The Day Patty Hearst Was Captured’ is currency and passport to a country both fearsome and fervently personal, an America of joy and disappointment and shit-wage transactions that, nonetheless, seem to have the power to redeem. This book is stunning for its many revelations, as in the poem ‘Vulture Skull,’ where we hear of a ‘dark / that hosts both what is foul in us / and any spark of infinity we might own’ or in the magnificent final poem ‘Hard Luck: A Requiem for Jerry Quarry’—gem-like, the poems open the heart-eye in rooms of light and living shadows. Of course there is music playing. Always-and-forever music.”—Roy Bentley, finalist for the Miller Williams Poetry Prize for Walking with Eve in the Loved City
