Lives of the Sleepers

“Dark and moving, sometimes morbid, yet also haunting in its search to understand the human mind, consciousness, emotion and expression, Lives of The Sleepers is profound and memorable.” —Wisconsin Bookwatch

"The dramatic monologues in Ned Balbo's Lives of the Sleepers are superb, the lyrics enthralling, and the meditations haunting. Balbo's taut lines pulse with life—the life of the moment in which they live and the lives of the great poets whom Balbo has assimilated, and transformed with his love. In the nuanced profundity of the past's living in the present and the present's being alive to the past, Balbo's aesthetic intelligence shimmers in every line of this powerful book." —Andrew Hudgins, Ohio State University, and author of Ecstatic in the Poison

"Many of the poems in Ned Balbo's new collection seem to center around a moment when the various sleepers provided by his erudite imagination awaken into their lives, or into their lives transformed by the strangest of dreams, or into the dream itself. It is perhaps the fact that we are never quite sure which of these situations obtains that gives these poems their impressive force." —Charles Martin

"This evocative collection by an award-winning poet brings together voices from different centuries in an effort to unravel the patterns that unite them. Using lyrical monologs, the poet travels through time, introducing such figures as a Victorian heroine uncovering a wax museum's hidden crimes and characters from Hitchcock films caught in their own traps." —Library Journal

"To realize the muse is song and not the girl—not the lost girl, not the dead girl (Ophelia, Laura, Alice, Beatrice, or Madeleine)—may be one of the poet's more resisted lessons; nevertheless, Ned Balbo traces this difficult education in new and lovely poems." —Judith Hall

"Among Balbo's most significant achievements in this volume is the way he inspects humanity from a biological perspective. He often reveals what is most human (loss, love, transformation, moral deformity) by writing with scientific exactness about bees, birds, and banana slugs. . . Balbo creates a collection distinguished for its eloquent merging of the historic, the biological, and the mythic." —American Book Review

“Nearly every poem in Balbo's second book offers a dramatic moment snatched from history or the archive, where the desires of the senses, of the body, negotiate their relation to intellectual love, the desires of the soul.” —Pleiades