Ladder of Hours

Ladder of Hours gathers poems written over four decades, a selection that teaches us how insight into everyday life can transform the world. Composed in language that is spare, almost skeletal, yet lacking nothing, Ladder of Hours investigates the subtleties of moments we might otherwise overlook. Althaus is interested in everything from the label on a whiskey bottle to the distance between emotion and idea. His poems reframe “ordinary” moments of perception, revealing unexpected meaning and resonance, and they do so in a way that seems strangely egoless, bent entirely on extracting and capturing the essence of his discoveries; Ladder of Hours takes us into numinous territory.