What are we paying in moral capital, Roderick wants to know, for an easy life in the suburbs? And most troubling, what if we have—or he has—willingly exchanged morality for comfort?

I have called the book a poetic treatise, but in effect, it is more an inquiry into our particular hearts; to me, that is the essential function of poetry.

These are frightening, moving, deeply human poems—poems such as these are sorely needed.

With that in mind, McCrae’s Forgiveness Forgiveness is a highly accomplished and moving collection of poetry. This is a stunning follow up to an already accomplished body of work.

Being made aware of the body is absolutely crucial to Conrad’s praxis, as he calls it, because this is where our memory resides.

Gallaher is a master of moving from punchlines to moments of real gravity. Cultural references abound in the book, and I could have chosen any one of them as an example. Gallaher’s book is about so many things that his axiom about life in general—“We decide with our attention what has meaning / and what doesn’t”—applies to his book as well.

Smirou takes the possessive pride of appropriation, or rather, personalization, of a historical figure: in this case Florentine Lorenzo de Medici, an Italian statesman and de facto ruler of the Florentine Republic during the Italian Renaissance: a magnate, diplomat, politician and patron of scholars, artists, and poets, most notably Botticelli and Michelangelo.

However, The New Testament is not entirely a poetry of witness, either. Made all the more vital by the violence and racial tensions we see daily on the evening news, Brown’s poems position him somewhere between recorder and controller.

Within its catalogs of the miscellaneous world, the book finds a cataloging of an observer always in danger of being swept away by things observed.

Associating “poetry” with “nothing” may seem to beckon after the rueful poet’s reduced expectation that, because poetry makes nothing happen, there is, in fact, nothing to defend.