The poems of IT WAS A TERRIBLE CLOUD AT TWILIGHT reflect on personal, social, moral, and historical terror. These ambitious, imagistic poems move through subjects of violence and loss that are both deeply personal and elegantly public. The elegiac poems in the final section are dedicated to the poet's friend, author Lucy Grealy, whose plight might also be said to embody terror. Lynch's poems are tactile and visual, coining words and phrases in surprising ways. They engage in intimate conversations that are both dark and whimsical. Selected by James Richardson from a field of more than six hundred manuscripts as the winner of the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Prize, this is Alessandra Lynch's second collection.