The poems in Alphabets of Elsewhere are richly coloured dispatches from places of transformation: from artist lofts and suburban train lines to the painted walls of Florentine chapels and the top of the Twin Towers.

Set around the troubled dawn of the new millennium, these poems blend music with image, loud song with quiet prayer, charting relationships lost and found and mapping wildly unexpected routes to all those elsewheres we can find in the very language that we live.

"Tim Keane's poems move with impetuous energy, fired by a centrifugal and neo-Romantic enthusiasm. His appetite for texture, colour, sound, culture, and sensation is inspiring."
Wayne Koestenbaum

"With a subtle, economic music that retains the strength of fiction, Tim Keane surveys the world - through desire's fancy and memories of the real - with the accuracy of a cartographer."
Ammiel Alcalay

"Tim Keane paints daybreaks, loves, losses, and longing in poems that are 'fish-rich and streaming.' His is a passionate voice that does not compromise its craft, a voice free of chic ironies, engaged with its times, politics, places beyond its borders, a voice that assures us American poetry is in good hands."
Naveed Alam

Tim Keane was born and raised in New York City. His writing has earned awards from The National Endowment for the Arts and The Bronx Council on the Arts, and his poems, stories, translations and essays have been published internationally. He teaches writing and comparative literature at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.