The oval hour
Subtitle: poems
By: by Kathleen Peirce.
Series: The Iowa poetry prize
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
Published: 1999
Place of publication: Iowa City
Language: eng
Number of pages: 69
Description: In The Oval Hour Kathleen Peirce addresses the vulnerability of language - which is to say the vulnerability of our reality - when we are in extreme states of desire and loss, especially erotic desire and erotic loss.

Central to the book is its series of "Confessions," twenty formally similar poems that contend with the Confessions of Saint Augustine. "Passing through innocence, I came either to experience / or guilt, or they came to me, displacing innocence": these luminous poems explore the generation and overlapping of carnal and metaphysical identities.