Ilyse Kusnetz (1966-2016), poet, essayist, journalist, is the author of Angel Bones and The Gravity of Falling. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Orion Magazine, Rattle, Guernica Daily, Islands Magazine, Kyoto Journal, and The Normal School, among others. She earned an MA in creative writing from Syracuse University and her PhD in contemporary feminist and postcolonial British literature from the University of Edinburgh. She guest-edited Scottish poetry features for Poetry International and the Atlanta Review. A professor at Valencia College, Ilyse lived with her husband, Brian Turner, in Orlando, Florida.

“Drawing deftly from history, science, public and personal lives, these poems knock the wind out of me with their indelible imagery and music, their sense of shared humanity in our compassion and cruelty, ignorance and brilliance, rage and tenderness. They find the spiritual and cosmic in the quotidian, and somehow pack all the world’s love, yearning, pain, and beauty into one poem—poem after poem, not unlike the lovers who end the collection—‘our fingers cupped the universe like water.’”
—April Ossmann

“Ilyse Kusnetz’s Small Hours is a ‘ministry of dreams’ preserving what is ‘not visible, but felt,’ the ‘ghostly firmament’ of the flesh, and in our very bones, the immanent flight concealed within us. Meanwhile the poet keeps watch over ‘disassembled countries,’ preserving ‘lost narratives, postcards from the dead,’ and the memory of those about whom ‘we know almost nothing.’ She calls forth monarchs, match girls, and astronomers, offers prescriptions for curing the plague, visits ‘Hitler’s childhood room preserved’ and the cockpit of the Enola Gay, and shows us kamikaze pilots smiling from their last photographs. In this radiant mosaic shot through with chips of historical time, Kusnetz takes flight as do her ‘white herons rising into the dark,’ and if the world she surveys is wounded, her poems ‘sing into the wound’ as a healer would sing. This is poetry of deep and compassionate intelligence.”
—Carolyn Forché

“Ilyse Kusnetz’s Small Hours has great range and lyrical precision. She moves from the historical to the surreal to the intensely personal with marvelous control, often blending the three. Even the darkest of her poems are illuminated by the vivacity of an imagination and the surprise of language that always seems to be in the act of discovering itself.”
—Stephen Dunn