The Eleventh Hour

Carolyn Marie Souaid distils the complex emergencies of the everyday with a keen eye, sharp ear and sure hand. Cycling through themes of aging, dying and the inescapable erosion of life, her poems are a poignant catalogue of finite moments, a nod to the “inadequacy of the present” and the “incremental withdrawal” of earthly things, peppered with insistent, eleventh-hour reminders that what ultimately matters is not the “finish line” or the “final performance” of a career, but the human spirit “orbiting the nucleus of time.” Whether it’s the irony of the Exit sign on a crashed plane or the wind arriving in the nick of time to depose our received ideas of the world, these poems of the eleventh hour are bridges connecting life and death, where nothing and everything matters, the sayable and the unsayable, the necessary and the futile.