The Lesser Fields

"Rob Schlegel has a mind of winter. Like the painter Morandi, Schlegel makes a world of absence and deprivation-our world, the world of human mortality-feel like plenitude. Imagine wanting to discover the place where you yourself 'have not yet happened.' Now imagine creating this place in a language of hard-won precision-a diction and syntax so elegantly austere that the smallest gesture becomes an explosion of possibility. The result is a book that feels rivetingly contemporary while resembling nothing else, a book that seems shockingly intimate while giving nothing away. The Lesser Fields is.