Download or read book The Oval Hour written by Kathleen Peirce and published by Iowa Poetry Prize. This book was released on 1999-03 with total page 92 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Oval Hour Kathleen Peirce addresses the vulnerability of language—which is to say the vulnerability of our reality—when we are in extreme states of desire and loss, especially erotic desire and erotic loss. Central to the book is its series of "Confessions," twenty formally similar poems that contend with the Confessions of Saint Augustine.“Passing through innocence, I came either to experience / or guilt, or they came to me, displacing innocence”: these luminous poems explore the generation and overlapping of carnal and metaphysical identities.