This is a book of necessity. Not in terms of our reading it or his writing it (though I believe this necessary, too), but in terms of what is at stake in this unassumingly powerful collection.

The book’s form is fluid, a central current buoys its pauses; the book unfurls, as if transcribing the ongoing cosmic song, a poetic tap into universal energy, recording, chanting along—interjecting—repeating and varying, making new stories of origin, moving on.

Poetry is always associated, to a certain extent, with enchantment—not necessarily magic, but a heightened state of being that moves above (or below) prosaic reality.

The poems of Armor, Amour reveal a serious mind wrestling with important subjects. The book is compulsively readable despite its gravity and occasional difficulty.

Striven, The Bright Treatise, offers readers a graceful synthesis of art and ethics…. a point of entry to a thought-provoking discussion of suicide as a social, philosophical, and ultimately political problem.

It is a distinct feature of [this] book that it impresses into service both logic and passion, and that it can sustain a nerdy delight in physical artifacts alongside metaphysical meditations.

You have to be fierce to write, and perhaps even read, these poems. They follow the call they hear. They are trustworthy but not reassuring. Hamilton shows us how stumbling is a necessary grace.

Road Scatter, Sandra Meek’s devastating new book of poetry, aches with a sense of loss that is not only personal (the collection is dedicated to her mother), but historical and global. This collection illuminates the fragility of our constructions—lives, buildings, societies—and their vulnerability to illness, folly, and the ravages of the natural world.

There is a problem, however, with this Romantic undertaking: the American frontier has long been closed, and worldwide there are very few outposts of the “undiscovered.” Even “the final frontier” seems to be shrinking rapidly. What one hopes is left—the landscape of the mind—may have been already co-opted, conquered