Narratives of trauma seem especially marked by the uncanny or unreal. The traumatized self is haunted by impressions of past harm that shiver out of view, appearing in the present as new panic and dread. In remembering old pain, we experience a partial failure of sight and long for sharper vision.

Molberg refuses to parse the usual polarities of religion and the natural world. She seeks to bring the two together, searching for the places and ideas that link them. . . .

He seems afraid that the world has become inured to the sickeningly steady stream of murders: “You see human / interest piece, sunny & rounding out the evening news / where I see eclipsed casket.” In the face of such violence, remaining silent is not an option.

“Before I was a man I was a man / made of pixels,” Christopher Kempf writes in “Oregon Trail,” a poem early in his prize-winning debut. Like many in the collection, Kempf’s ode to the titular computer game is about coming of age in the Information Age, where writing entails virtual violence. . . .”

In her stunning new collection Cyclorama, Daneen Wardrop applies the unique artistic resources of poetry to the task of social history. Structured as an extended sequence of linked persona pieces, the work in this finely crafted volume eschews the great figures of the American Civil War to give voice to individuals who may otherwise have remained voiceless: wives, children, and the invisible labor that sustained an entire nation.

The shifting meaning, line by line and poem by poem, attests to McCrae’s excellent care of race and language. Through its poetics, perhaps McCrae’s book has something to teach us about nuance of thought in the face of divisive moments.

Bendall’s aesthetic of incompletion asserts that conventions of language make us incapable of seeing the world as anything other than extensions of ourselves, feelingly pointing to limits of that perspective. Dazzling and intuitive poetry may not save us, but many who face coming loss turn to language’s transformational illusion.