The Rain at Midnight is Joseph Hutchison’s fourth full-length collection.

Title: The Rain at Midnight
ISBN: 1-890932-12-4
Publication Date: April 2000
Length: 96 pages
Binding: Trade paper

“For twenty five years I have admired Joseph Hutchison’s poems. The Rain at Midnight shows him to be better than ever at touching our hearts. These finely wrought and imaginative poems deserve our close attention and our deepest admiration.”

— Ted Kooser, Poet Laureate of the United States 2004-2006

“Joseph Hutchison’s poems speak of love, its wounds and failures, its bitter struggles, and its peace and redemption at last, dramas set against a backdrop of the felt particularity of the world—smog-eaten elms and maples, the creak of fraying knots, a broken thermos bottle—but also a fresh-cut stem of iris, the cormorant with feathers slick from rain, and a moon like dollop of snow. The Rain at Midnight begins and ends with rain, the journey is through melancholy to a kind of sad yet sweet acceptance as the heart’s ‘drained cup’ is slowly filled again.”

— Mary Crow, Poet Laureate of Colorado, author of I Have Tasted the Apple

“Joseph Hutchison is a magician. He can take anything—a bare maple in winter, a tangle of grass, an ordinary sidewalk, a window—and transform it into our human heart. He understands us from the inside out; he knows why we’re ‘rootless and easily wounded,’ why ‘we can touch only traces’ of what makes us feel most alive. The Rain at Midnight is a magnificent magnet that keeps pulling us back to its pages. It is a book about desire and about the boundlessness of passion.”

— Andrea Hollander, author of Woman in the Painting

“In the voluminous literature of midlife being produced by aging boomers, Joseph Hutchison’s collection, ‘The Rain at Midnight,’ is a dark gem, distinguish by its honesty and refusal to let the poet get by too easily on his considerable verbal facility. [The book attempts] to capture nothing less than the full arc of the reordering of a life in midcourse.”

— Thomas R. Smith in The Saint Paul Pioneer Press

CLICK HERE TO READ A SAMPLING OF POEMS FROM THE BOOK