The Reading Warehouse

Anthony Hassett wrote most of these poems during the final months of his life when struggling with terminal illness. Hermetic in style, his poetry is the response of an ever-inquisitive, rebellious, yet magnanimous mind, to the unspeakable cruelty and beauty of the human realm. Hassett's gaze is direct and sustaining -- willing to fully engage in the physical world in pursuit of emancipatory potential. His voice is of both an unapologetically well-read intellectual and an anarchistic nomad, crafted and honed from a half-century of travel and Gnostic pursuit.

"Last Poems" is of particular value and poignancy because the work presents a rare glimpse into the visceral subtleties of a failing body that is documented by a vital, enduring, and expansive mind. Hassett was a keen and fearless observer of the ambiguities of his own internal condition, and, equally so, if not more critically of, the state of the external world; the result is a seamless articulation of all that he encounters. Dantesque in its transformatory power of the imagination, this sensual work is at once physical and metaphysical; literal and symbolic; containing bursts of humor, as well as moments of scathing critique.

"Last Poems" is ultimately a condemnation of what is, but also a poetic guidebook of what could be: revelatory in its humble, but magnificent, instances of grace.