Listen to the bird song. As Lipska writes,” “It’s just an untreated case of chronic echo.”

Paino excavates what meaning we create behind our acts of living, what haunts us at the furthest edges of all we carry . . . Indeed, there is an utter darkness throughout the whole of <i>Obscura,</i> in coming to grips with mortality.

In the absence of family, the self becomes sister, becomes multiple, becomes animal—more fiercely present when it is its only company and counsel, its last and most stalwart protector.

There is no shortage of wonder and love in this collection, despite the omnipresence of queer and Jewish generational trauma in the speaker’s communities.

One Less River [is] a collection that rewards us over and again for joining its author in not turning away from the difficult truths we face in a world that goes on worlding even when we fail to heed the better angels of our nature.

Quiñones situates desire as the fluxing heart of the collection and imbues its hunger with a Dionysian power and wildness.

Creating sympathy is the poet’s role, and learning to sympathize is our only salvation.

Stancek opens a dialectic between the speaker and mystic Hildegard of Bingen that will surface, recede, and resurface throughout the collection.