A poet wrestles with faith and loss post-pandemic.

In these poems, Peter Cooley encounters both the political realities of loss through the pandemic in New Orleans and personal loss through the deaths of family members and friends. Death is a constant in this book of elegies, but the redemptive power of representation is persistent as this poet of faith memorializes imagined and lived experiences.

World Without Finishing continues Peter Cooley's search for the ordinary miraculous, the subject of his books for four decades. In those liminal spaces where Cooley voyages, the otherworldly is a haunting presence, whether in a painting by Rembrandt, the voices of the dead in a Louisiana cemetery for lepers or a mayfly his imagination conjures for its single day on earth. The gods--and God--are near at hand and far from us in the mysterious riddling of Cooley's new poems.