Joy Ladin faces the relentlessness of our most vexing riddles with grace, musicality, and wry humor.

Over the book’s ten sections Hix employs a slew of voices to do his bidding: some destitute and despondent, others liquored-up and looking to fight.

Pulitzer Prize winner Stephen Dunn’s new book of poetry, Whereas, comes out of a life examined but also beckons the reader to examine their own life, asks us to believe “the future has a chance.”

Where the speaker exposes her vulnerabilities, the reader must connect and piece together. There is intimacy in this kind of exercise, for the act of reading is also a process of marking and being marked by language.

Meek takes risks with these poems, testing the boundaries of her sympathy, whether for the human beings she encounters in their relative precarity, or for the fauna and flora that find means of existence in Namibia’s arid climate.

The reader walks a labyrinth, searching for clues, each chapter relinquishing a few while simultaneously adding to the mystery.

Fernandez poses an intellectual, referential voice that is continually confounding a consistent line of thought.