George Looney’s first book, Animals Housed in the Pleasure of the Flesh, won the 1995 Bluestem Award and was published by Bluestem Press. His work has also won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Ohio Arts Council, as well as awards from numerous literary journals, and has appeared in The Southern Review, The Kenyon Review, Denver Quarterly, Southern Poetry Review, Quarterly West and others. For seven years, he served as Editor-in-Chief of Mid-American Review. He currently teaches at Penn State Erie.

“The poems of George Looney speak the language of the dream world. This is a vividly surreal landscape of wind and smoke, crowded with ghosts, angels, drunks, defrocked priests. It’s a haunting, intense vision that will not be denied.” –Martin Espada

“Not since the last books of Richard Hugo have I heard such melancholy and affecting tones as in George Looney’s wonderful new Attendant Ghosts. How can poetry so languid be so tight? How can such action yield such fine, meditative deliberation? Such are the irreconcilable circumstances of our lives, Looney says. Just so, he constructs his complex poems in long, spacious lines, and ironizes the work with crisp syntax and a quick narrative pace. Attendant Ghosts is a passionate, penetrating book.” –David Baker

“These poems luxuriate in the willing melancholy of not-quite-despair in the midst of actual suffering. Something certainly is amiss in this speaker’s exhausted and exhausting locale; so he rouses and, in the spirit of a plain-style prophet, raises his voice to advocate the proposition of hope, lends his breath to its unlikely expression.” — Scott Cairns

“Like Ray Carver and Richard Hugo before him, George Looney serves up a nightcap and a prayer with the poems of Attendant Ghosts. Monks, women and madmen, lapsed Catholics and the collapsed lovers of small towns and small town bars: they’ re all ghosts in this burly, breathless, darkly glowing collection.” –Kathy Fagan

More Information:

Verse Daily

Prairie Schooner

Missouri Review

AGNI