Description:
n his Late Measures, the lyric visionary Andrew Mossin reveals a self's earliest memories at the "debut of consciousness." Two geographic zones at two contrasting seasons-the brightness of a Greek spring and the brisk snow of East coast winter-are the primal ground for aura-rich fragments of witnessing, watching, contrasting, savoring, exploring pulses of time. In "quiet intensity," he "measures" the continuing mysteries of nomadic personhood, exile and rootedness. Mossin's book offers an assured and poised arc of pensive affirmation.
Brief description: Born in Athens, Greece, Andrew Mossin is the author of more than ten volumes of poetry, including most recently Drafts for Shelley (The Bodily Press, 2026) and Whitman at the Bardo (Spuyten Duyvil, 2025). He is the author of Male Subjectivity and Poetic Form in "New American" Poetry (Palgrave 2010) and editor of Thinking with the Poem: Essays on the Poetry and Poetics of Rachel Blau Duplessis (University of New Mexico Press, 2024). He teaches in the Intellectual Heritage Program at Temple University in Philadelphia.
Review Quotes:
In his Late Measures, the lyric visionary Andrew Mossin reveals a self's earliest memories at the "debut of consciousness." Two geographic zones at two contrasting seasons-the brightness of a Greek spring and the brisk snow of East coast winter-are the primal ground for aura-rich fragments of witnessing, watching, contrasting, savoring, exploring pulses of time. In "quiet intensity," he "measures" the continuing mysteries of nomadic personhood, exile and rootedness. Mossin's book offers an assured and poised arc of pensive affirmation.
Rachel Blau DuPlessis, author of Drafts
In Late Measures moments rise into further moments as Andrew Mossin moves ever more emphatically into fundamental mysteries of each day. These poems catch the feel of thought. They abide line after line in an ever almost here Eden of perception, located in and around the Chesapeake Bay. Late Measures is a continuous contemplation of light, place, nature, line and color, offering us the austere wonder by which the soul infers further destinations. Devastations are a given here. But so too is the plenitude of any particular life. No surprise that the ghost of Whitman comes by to visit now and then! This is a poetry that is calm, relentless, and quietly ecstatic in its vow to recover a desecrated and absconded wholeness.
Joseph Donahue
"What is after / the otherness // spied through a / doorway at sundown," asks Andrew Mossin in this splendid collection of lyric sequences. Mossin is among the poets most committed to seriality and its potential for an interplay of feeling, premonition, citation, incongruence, and imagination. The poems in Late Measures situate Athens, Crete, shaman birds, memory's accent, Whitman, recursive language and thought, parking lots, orioles and sparrows, all circulating in cadences that summon sympathies and daylight, human matter and gnostic shadow, in ways to figure that otherness found most deeply within.
Peter O'Leary