In States, his fourth collection, Ciaran Berry offers poems that are attentive to the cinema of the moment and the film that becomes the life. They meditate on everything from the blockbuster to the B-movie, and there’s the footage from the author’s own life, offering an encounter with the increasingly dis-United States, where he has now lived for more than a quarter of a century, and with an Ireland he recognizes more and more only through memory. Often we find him in transit, looking down on clouds during a transatlantic flight or driving his newborn son home through the snows of Connecticut. What does it mean to be an alien of any kind?, he asks.

High-stepping between giddiness and gravity, in long lines that work to bridge the gap between now and then, and here and there, these poems also consider what it means to live on this fraught planet as it spins anti-clockwise at roughly a thousand miles per hour, and where it seems, now more than ever, as if the funfair has ended and the disaster movie has just begun.

“His 100-page States is both photography and myth-breaking, a collection that will repay much re-reading; a full summer-long of reading.”

— Thomas McCarthy, Live Encounters