Distilled Lives, Volume 2, is a rich and diverse collection of poetry from members of the Illinois State Poetry Society. Represented in the anthology are new wordcrafters alongside authors like John Mahoney and David Christensen, poets in their nineties who have been writing throughout their lives. There are publishing first-timers as well as Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award nominee James Reiss and the prolific Joan Colby and Jacob Erin-Cilberto, each with more than a dozen volumes to their credit. Here you will find formal poetry, including Johnson's villanelle, Larson's pantoum, Roby's triolets, Auld's haibun, Eaton's sonnets. There are poems with stylized messages, both no-caps-no-commas and perfect-grammar free verse, rhymed lines and prose-poem paragraphs. The lives distilled here offer a panoply of poetic style and individual creativity, a challenging and comforting gift of words offered by eighty-one representatives of the Illinois State Poetry Society.