In his new chapbook, Present Conditions, Joseph Massey writes that "the weather within / is the weather without." His poems chronicle a difficult winter where the universe grows colder, his speaker taking all day to "filter out the debris of a dream." These poems bring us the aching beauty of the natural world, and the crushing sadness of interior space. A speaker's failed suicide. The return to sanity. The waiting where we can't go on, but we do go on, if nothing else when "the windows / . . . go blind."
