“Odds” are handicaps that offer a weaker player a chance of winning against a stronger one. In adopting baby Suzhou from China, Daneen Wardrop is doing just that—increasing Suzhou’s odds of survival in a world where girl children may be seen as liabilities.

Matvei Yankelevich’s Boris by the Sea is, as Rosemarie Waldrop says in her blurb on the book’s back cover, not so much a collection of poems and dramatic sketches

Emily Wilson draws inspiration from Robert Hooke’s seventeenth-century publication of the same name that details Hooke’s study of microscopy. Both poet and naturalist proceed with the imperative of expanding knowledge;