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Illocality
"I find it refreshing and somehow also sobering to observe the way Massey sticks so closely to the perceptual world. Like William Carlos Williams, he challenges us to see the value in putting things in words."—Rae Armantrout, American Poet Joseph Massey composed Illocality in his first year in western Massachusetts. Massey's austere landscapes channel the quiet shock, euphoria, and introspection that come with reorientation to place. His language fights apathy with grace and sensitivity. Here are poems with their eyes on seasons, plants, sunlight, and animals, all the while looking for stability and the language to describe it. From "Parse": The speed
at which sleep's
fogged dialogue withers into the present
noun-scape This rift valley A volley of
seasonal beacons Joseph Massey is the author of Areas of Fog (Shearsman Books, 2009), At the Point (Shearsman Books, 2011), To Keep Time (Omnidawn, 2014), as well as thirteen chapbooks and various limited-edition broadsides and folios. His work has also appeared in many journals and magazines, including The Nation , A Public Space , American The Journal of the Academy of American Poets , Verse , Western Humanities Review , Quarterly West ; and in the anthologies Visiting Dr. Poems Inspired by the Life and Work of William Carlos Williams (University of Iowa Press, 2011), Haiku in The First Hundred Years (W.W. Norton & Company, 2013) and Please Excuse This 100 New Poems for the Next Generation (Viking Penguin, 2015).
at which sleep's
fogged dialogue withers into the present
noun-scape This rift valley A volley of
seasonal beacons Joseph Massey is the author of Areas of Fog (Shearsman Books, 2009), At the Point (Shearsman Books, 2011), To Keep Time (Omnidawn, 2014), as well as thirteen chapbooks and various limited-edition broadsides and folios. His work has also appeared in many journals and magazines, including The Nation , A Public Space , American The Journal of the Academy of American Poets , Verse , Western Humanities Review , Quarterly West ; and in the anthologies Visiting Dr. Poems Inspired by the Life and Work of William Carlos Williams (University of Iowa Press, 2011), Haiku in The First Hundred Years (W.W. Norton & Company, 2013) and Please Excuse This 100 New Poems for the Next Generation (Viking Penguin, 2015).
- GenresPoetry
120 pages, Paperback
First published September 8, 2015
51 people want to read
About the author
Joseph Massey
32 books78 followersJoseph Massey is the author of A New Silence (forthcoming from Shearsman Books), Illocality (Wave Books, 2015) and a trilogy grounded in the landscape of coastal Humboldt County, California: Areas of Fog (Shearsman Books, 2009), At the Point (Shearsman Books, 2011), and To Keep Time (Omnidawn, 2014).
His chapbooks include Minima St. (Range, 2003), Eureka Slough (Effing Press, 2005), Bramble (Hot Whiskey, 2005), Property Line (Fewer & Further, 2006), Out of Light (Kitchen Press, 2008), Within Hours (Fault Line Press, 2008), The Lack Of (Nasturtium Press, 2009), Exit North (Book Thug, 2010), Thaw Compass (Press Board Press, 2014), An Interim (Tungsten Press, 2014), What Follows (Ornithopter Press, 2015), Present Conditions (Hollyridge Press) and 5 Poems (Tungsten Press, 2018).
His work has appeared in many journals and magazines, including The Nation, A Public Space, American Poet: The Journal of the Academy of American Poets, Verse, GeoHumanities, Talisman, and in
anthologies: Visiting Dr. Williams: Poems Inspired by the Life and Work of William Carlos Williams (University of Iowa Press, 2011), Haiku in English: The First Hundred Years (W.W. Norton & Company, 2013), Please Excuse This Poem: 100 New Poems for the Next Generation (Viking Penguin, 2015), The Poem Is You: 60 Contemporary American Poems and How to Read Them (Belknap Press, 2016), and Renga for Obama (Harvard University Press, 2018).
He worked as an instructor and teaching assistant for the University of Pennsylvania’s ModPo (Modern and Contemporary Poetry) MOOC, which serves thousands of students, worldwide, at no cost. He now teaches privately.
He lives in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts.
His chapbooks include Minima St. (Range, 2003), Eureka Slough (Effing Press, 2005), Bramble (Hot Whiskey, 2005), Property Line (Fewer & Further, 2006), Out of Light (Kitchen Press, 2008), Within Hours (Fault Line Press, 2008), The Lack Of (Nasturtium Press, 2009), Exit North (Book Thug, 2010), Thaw Compass (Press Board Press, 2014), An Interim (Tungsten Press, 2014), What Follows (Ornithopter Press, 2015), Present Conditions (Hollyridge Press) and 5 Poems (Tungsten Press, 2018).
His work has appeared in many journals and magazines, including The Nation, A Public Space, American Poet: The Journal of the Academy of American Poets, Verse, GeoHumanities, Talisman, and in
anthologies: Visiting Dr. Williams: Poems Inspired by the Life and Work of William Carlos Williams (University of Iowa Press, 2011), Haiku in English: The First Hundred Years (W.W. Norton & Company, 2013), Please Excuse This Poem: 100 New Poems for the Next Generation (Viking Penguin, 2015), The Poem Is You: 60 Contemporary American Poems and How to Read Them (Belknap Press, 2016), and Renga for Obama (Harvard University Press, 2018).
He worked as an instructor and teaching assistant for the University of Pennsylvania’s ModPo (Modern and Contemporary Poetry) MOOC, which serves thousands of students, worldwide, at no cost. He now teaches privately.
He lives in the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts.
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
October 25, 2015
I read this book over the course of a couple of nights after the days had filled me up with their shiny clutter and I felt depressed and diminished. The poems in *Illocaity* are for this state a spare therapy, opening my head to light and space and thinking and weather. Some books are good windows this way. This is one. Massey's poems are small in the Dickinson way, in the Neidecker way, in the Creeley way, which is to say: huge.
When weather
won't say
the unsaid.
An exchange
between light and wind—
the way I'd want
a line to move
to carve space.
Light and wind,
and the objects
between them,
pronouncing
only themselves.
When weather
won't say
the unsaid.
An exchange
between light and wind—
the way I'd want
a line to move
to carve space.
Light and wind,
and the objects
between them,
pronouncing
only themselves.
January 23, 2016
Massey beautifully erases the distinction between nature, and the random clutter of parking lots... fragments of human artifice. One is never left with the false tranquility of contemplation of the "natural world:" The observing eye in these poems is not passive, or restorative of some lost numinosity of childhood, as in a Wordsworthian sense. Sex shop signs, bricks, asphalt parking lots, broken glass... and the windows themselves, through which the world is perceived, sharpen senses to a cutting point, prick one's body into a wakeful anxious dream. They pry open the mind to an awareness of things--things... pregnant with ideas that exist beyond words.
October 25, 2016
Reading this twice on a blustery autumn day was the perfect setting. Evocative, beautiful, stark, and a bit mystical would be some ways to describe Joseph Massey's gripping verse. Essence precedes existence or does existence precede essence, or as Massey seems to say: both.
"The world is real/in its absence of a world"; or "That anything isn't/That anything is..." While reading Massey, I was reminded of William Carlos Williams, as other readers have noted, but I especially felt that during the last twelve lines of Massey's poem "Contain." I remembered one of my favorite Williams's poems "The Catholic Bells." Williams final stanza was the link to Massey's "Contain." Here is Williams stanza, "the beginning and the end/of the ringing! Ring ring/ring ring ring ring ring!/Catholic bells--!" The two poems are not thematically linked, per say, but I was made to pause by Massey's idea to "Listen to an hour/ shift shape,..." and, "...sonic detritus..." and, "...a church bell's/ high note/bent above/dusk folding/the
corners in." I will read this book again and again because there is so much more to acknowledge and uncover, like how "Ice fastens/caution tape...to weeds wrapped/around a mound of/crushed cans." Massey's verse also needs to be read in the book format so you can take in the layout on the page. I thank him as I was inspired to go look at my verse and scrub the hell out of it to make it better. Great and moving book: read it.
"The world is real/in its absence of a world"; or "That anything isn't/That anything is..." While reading Massey, I was reminded of William Carlos Williams, as other readers have noted, but I especially felt that during the last twelve lines of Massey's poem "Contain." I remembered one of my favorite Williams's poems "The Catholic Bells." Williams final stanza was the link to Massey's "Contain." Here is Williams stanza, "the beginning and the end/of the ringing! Ring ring/ring ring ring ring ring!/Catholic bells--!" The two poems are not thematically linked, per say, but I was made to pause by Massey's idea to "Listen to an hour/ shift shape,..." and, "...sonic detritus..." and, "...a church bell's/ high note/bent above/dusk folding/the
corners in." I will read this book again and again because there is so much more to acknowledge and uncover, like how "Ice fastens/caution tape...to weeds wrapped/around a mound of/crushed cans." Massey's verse also needs to be read in the book format so you can take in the layout on the page. I thank him as I was inspired to go look at my verse and scrub the hell out of it to make it better. Great and moving book: read it.
September 10, 2015
"Perceptions / a process" really sums it up. These poems slow down time and take in everything as it is and only as it is. They beautifully investigate the moment of their own being as much as the objects or landscapes they are occupied with. Nearest comparison I can draw is Niedecker but more alarming and haiku-like. Fantastic. Highlight for me was the "long" poem "take place."
November 3, 2015
I felt my insides curl and cough up through ice image and stillness of vision.
May 31, 2017
i read this in uh winter 2015-16 & forgot all about it
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
August 24, 2025
“To walk into it—
breathe the frequencies
that knot the air, another
animal baffled
to be an animal.”
—
“Birdsong next door
slipknots construction noise.
The day has its ballast.”
—
“No silence
in the house.
No house
in silence.
Something's
always
mumbling,
stridulating
into dust—
the drift
of it—
which is
not a
song.”
—
“It must be enough
to live in the variations
of wind alone.
To sing the seams.
Apprehended
by vision, we
think we've seen.”
—
“Grief ground down
to the bare sense of an I
imagining itself here.
Winter-chipped sidewalk
annotated by grass clippings
and bird shit
white as paint.
Phrase after phrase
falls into place, out of
place, rewriting a world.
Sight: a lengthening fracture.”
—
“Thin indentations
where language was—
toppled row of tombstones—
appear and reappear
under a long wave of grass.”
—
“The world is real
in its absence of a world.”
—
“April shapes March mud
the bulk of
the backyard
squirrels plod antique
junk pile rust
articulates
rust”
breathe the frequencies
that knot the air, another
animal baffled
to be an animal.”
—
“Birdsong next door
slipknots construction noise.
The day has its ballast.”
—
“No silence
in the house.
No house
in silence.
Something's
always
mumbling,
stridulating
into dust—
the drift
of it—
which is
not a
song.”
—
“It must be enough
to live in the variations
of wind alone.
To sing the seams.
Apprehended
by vision, we
think we've seen.”
—
“Grief ground down
to the bare sense of an I
imagining itself here.
Winter-chipped sidewalk
annotated by grass clippings
and bird shit
white as paint.
Phrase after phrase
falls into place, out of
place, rewriting a world.
Sight: a lengthening fracture.”
—
“Thin indentations
where language was—
toppled row of tombstones—
appear and reappear
under a long wave of grass.”
—
“The world is real
in its absence of a world.”
—
“April shapes March mud
the bulk of
the backyard
squirrels plod antique
junk pile rust
articulates
rust”
February 19, 2022
Amazing! A poetry collection that focuses aesthetically on the gross end-of-Winter thaw right before Spring. Well worth it to read it out loud. Real effort was put in here to make the words dance off your tongue. It is simultaneously abstract and pretty grounded in subject matter. I liked it a lot. I wanted it to keep going.
December 31, 2023
“It must be enough
to live in the variations
of wind alone.
To sing the seams.”
This book feels like a gust of wind on the cusp of winter that makes you wish you brought an extra coat, but chills you just enough to enjoy the sweetness of changing seasons. I enjoy revisiting these poems every year around this time.
to live in the variations
of wind alone.
To sing the seams.”
This book feels like a gust of wind on the cusp of winter that makes you wish you brought an extra coat, but chills you just enough to enjoy the sweetness of changing seasons. I enjoy revisiting these poems every year around this time.
May 11, 2017
"As if a field guide/ could prevent/ the present// from disintegrating/ around us." Joseph Massey's energetic, enigmatic, laconic collection investigates the tension present in the moment and in the settings in which our moments unfold.
May 30, 2017
refreshing read from a young poet. reminded me of both ric caddel and peter gizzi in its use of landscape to hone the poetic line
June 29, 2019
Massey is a genius.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews