AustLit

'Philip Hammial’s Detroit & Selected Poems is riddled with daring and chance. The voice, though well traveled—‘Rotterdam, Mombasa, Odessa’ or ‘Gdansk, Haiphong, Caracas’—seems, through playful juxtapositions of language and knowing humor, always located in Detroit. The characters of the poems, such as the ‘opener of a bear’s eye’ or monks who make ‘the sound that carries your mother home,’ dare to stare into ‘the face of Death.’ Hammial’s poetry transports the reader through an interior world where object and memory become metaphor, and, in the end, he leaves us like his speaker ‘in the maze blowing.’' (Publication summary)

The narrator works at a mental health institution and comes into contact with several different patients.