Day for Night

Day for Night is an inventory of the metropolis: a street atlas, a field guide, a calendar of days and nights passed in New York City.

With cinematic immediacy, the moment is held in color and light; the poet sees the universal in its luminous particulars–the composition of sundown against the Empire State Building, paper valentines in a Chelsea diner window, the big blue whale in the Museum of Natural History. A love song to the city, these poems are at once nostalgic and sharply aware of the present and its inevitable passing. “The light keeps changing,” observes the poet, “I clutch every tender detail of these days.”

Reviews & Praise

“Fully plugged into the contemporary scene, Griffin Hansbury’s poems are tingling with the voltage of city culture. Day for Night is buoyant with irony, sparkling with allusions, but not afraid to play the blue note.” – Billy Collins

“I love this flower-mad sweet collection of poems… Day for Night is a strikingly good and compassionate book–compassionate towards self and the world. And it’s fun–puckish and mellifluous like a captivating song, then it turns a corner and it’s utterly new.” – Eileen Myles

“The contents of Griffin Hansbury’s Day for Night read like snippets of black and white film noir… These are the works of a poetic Holly Golightly with a champagne buzz, breathing life into high style.” – Lambda Book Report