[03/17/26] Unger, Tomas: Odd Hour

Unbound Edition Press, paperback

Publication Date: March 17, 2026

Publisher Marketing: In Odd Hour, Tomas Unger creates a luminous cartography of memory and witness, where sleepwalking children navigate hotel corridors and chess players hover between move and possibility. These poems inhabit spaces in flux — airports between night and morning, museums where ancient figures still breathe, the moment before a piece touches the board — finding profound beauty in states of suspension and transition.

Unger's voice moves with equal grace through intimate family portraits and historical reckonings, from his great-grandfather's encounter with Halley's comet to the Ukrainian famine's wandering musicians. Whether capturing a tennis match that stretches past midnight or a pianist learning to play with one hand, these poems locate the sacred in the everyday and the everyday in extremity.

With remarkable formal control and emotional precision, Odd Hour reveals how we orient ourselves not by what is fixed, but by what shifts — the ferry captain's reassurance in rough waters, the conductor's wild gestures against darkness, the persistence of song when all else fails. This is poetry of profound humanity and startling grace.

"Tomas Unger has the poetic gift of an enchanted vision of time, in all its limitless range, re-animating rather than merely elegiac: bandura music, the parallel flashing interiors of New York subway trains, Brazil in 1910, the moment of a chess piece held above the board, the intensity of tennis and the 'immense boredom' of cricket, famous artists, nameless characters ('grandparents and torturers / and exiles'): each real thing illuminated in its own way by the temporal mystery of its passing and its endurance. Odd Hour is a poignant, beautiful read." — Robert Pinsky