Onlikenesses.

My new book, Onlikenesses, has been published by the Cultural Society.

Here is what Toby Martinez de las Rivas wrote about it: “Poetry is fundamentally the search for a form that will release the flood of language that gathers and seethes in us. In Onlikenesses, it feels as though Peter O’Leary has located his ideal form. In writing a long poem whose (almost) every line begins with ‘like,’ O’Leary has created something dazzlingly rich that accesses with extraordinary rapidity and dexterity the full range of his voice and all its manifold lyric qualities. We have confession, tender and intimate address, political outrage, memory, biology, geology, the Abyss, the passing of aeons, log cabins, the mystical structure of cathedrals, theodicies, porches, grasses, birds, music, water, arcana and a thousand other flashes of light burning off the objects, beings, ideas, and histories that grab his attention. In this, his magnum opus, he embraces both the ‘one likeness’ and the ‘un-likeness’ of all things—their singlehood in the one creation; their dizzying and beautiful variety in the fallen world.”

You can get a copy through Asterism, along with all the Cultural Society titles, which includes Chris Glomski’s magnificent new book, Inscrutable House. Chris and I recently read from our new books here in Chicago at the Winnemac Poetry Project.

Omair Hussain, myself, and Chris Glomski, after the Winnemac Poetry Project reading on October 17, 2026.

The painting on the cover of Onlikenesses was made by Omair Hussain, a modernist.