"""To read Clif Mason's lines is to stagger through the shimmering ruins of a darkening apocalypse, where the only salvation is the troubled beauty of the journey, and to find, somehow, that beauty is enough. 'We have this brief time, ' his lines remind us. 'Walk with me, ' they say. And we do."" -- Joseph Fasano author of The Dark Heart of Every Wild Thing ""Do you want a journey AND a love story? This poem delivers both, plus an invitation (and a template) to "". . . take this leaden hour and make it gold."" -- Marjorie Saiser, author of The Woman in the Moon ""The Book of Night & Waking is an expansive, expressive, heartfelt act of witness. From ghosted, forever out-of-reach American ideals through poignant personal landscapes, this compact and explosive chapbook, composed with a burning passion and infinite compassion, transcends contemporary politics to surprise, enlighten, and terrify us with its elegiac experimentations that, were he writing today, Whitman would be proud of. These are songs that ""wreathe us like smoke"". These are songs that truly ""play through me, / through you, / through endless night & waking."" -- John Sibley Williams, author of As One Fire Consumes Another & Skin Memory"