The Four Horsemen.

I have a new book! It’s available for purchase through the Cultural Society website.

Here’s what Steven Toussaint says about the book:

Those in the know know that Peter O’Leary is the torchbearer of a rich if neglected poetic lineage: the “American Gnostic.” Through his critical and editorial labors, O’Leary has initiated poets and readers into the secret wisdom and apocalyptic promise transmitted unbrokenly from Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, down through Robert Duncan and Ronald Johnson, to contemporaries like Nathaniel Mackey, Joseph Donahue, and Pam Rehm. Those who read O’Leary’s poetry feel the wind and precipitation of a unique imaginarium peopled by dreamers, ascetics, birders, analysts, foragers, sorcerers—all of them watchers, watchful for God in his multiform emanations.

In The Four Horsemen, O’Leary turns his eye to Dante, Milton, Blake, and Whitman. His critical style is enthusiastic, quite literally “god-possessed.” His passwords are vision, power, and transmission. His reading is fired by conviction: that the revelatory imperatives of apocalyptic poetry flout our current cultural inertia and spiritual despair. The result is a book of true importance, which is less concerned with rewriting literary history than with seeing what happens when the shocking and destabilizing language of poets works on the souls of other poets, on O’Leary himself, over time, and then with following those lines of force wherever they lead. As rigorous as it is rapturous, The Four Horsemen is the best guide I know for how to live intensely with poetry.