Almost Human

Poetry. California Studies. Winner of the Dorset Prize, selected by Edward Hirsch. As in a profound love affair, Thomas Centolella's new poems register attraction, delight, expectations fulfilled and foiled, and moments of great feeling cherished and/or lamented. Employing the vividness of narrative without yielding to its linear strictures and overly familiar tonalities, many of the first-person protagonists in ALMOST HUMAN: POEMS are mysterious figures at once engaging and idiosyncratic, even outright eccentric. Often betwixt and between, neither here nor there, they are uncertain of actually getting anywhere. ALMOST HUMAN: POEMS documents the restive life-force incarnated in an endangered species—our own—and charts the movement of the self between spirit and human, recalling the idea, attributed to Teilhard de Chardin, that we aren't human beings having a spiritual experience but spiritual beings having a human experience.

"Thomas Centolella is one of those poets whose deeply thoughtful poems are best read on a quiet evening beneath stars. Philosophical without being didactic, they unfold, usually with the help of a chance human encounter, a sight, smell or sound emanating from the city, all while musing on an old master's lost notion. Quite simply, I love his meandering poems which twist and turn as if walking a labyrinth of back streets. ALMOST HUMAN is an unusual combination of urban and spiritual, the eternal and the every day."—Dorianne Laux