Green is a careful student of human strength and frailty, aware of the dichotomies always at play in the life cycle, and in the clash of the natural world with technology.

In a startling and invigorating way, each of the following poems is another party game enmeshed with violence and darkness: the violence of language twisted beautifully like a balloon poodle and darkness revealed as illuminate like the bumper of a car leaving sparks after a hit and run.

The speaker mourns his mother while she lives and after she dies; he writes about other human losses, intimate and societal like those who perished in the 9/11 terrorist attacks; and he profoundly depicts environmental losses, species-specific and planetary.

The gorgeous cover strikes the first note of the theme: a traditional mountain landscape with steep inclines nestled in a white fog with a couple of trees breaking the lines and reminding us we are a mix of our roots, dug into the earth, and our branches reaching into mystery and the eternal.

Ever, the body risked is one dissolving, while the body through which the reader sees is, itself, nearly altogether dissolved. Those moments in which Falci’s own voice and persona peek through the pages, however, sing all the brighter—in these bits of self-reflection, the poet considers his own hand, the limits of his eyes and voice in the curation of these collected words.

These poems take on the historical and current oppression of Black Americans, particularly Black women—including slavery, lynching, blackface, cultural appropriation, and gentrification. Not a short list.

Biespiel grapples with global crisis through the lens of the individual—specifically the relationship between two lovers. It’s a particularly affecting lens to adopt given that individual nihilism is a practically universal response to systemic crises like climate change, poverty, famine, and the potential for nuclear holocaust.