Elevated Threat Level

Perhaps every poem is a riddle for which the answer is the poem itself. Perhaps each of these adroit lyrics by the poet, critic, translator, and activist Rachel Galvin is a riddle for which the answer is the entire world in all its sad, brutal, and delightful contradiction. For surely every brief lyric in this book feels simultaneously triaged amidst a world of active damage and precisely poised, resourceful, nimble as a needle, quick as a stitch. For surely every brief lyric in this book has the dazzle and dismay of a candle, just as it goes out.--Joyelle McSweeney

These ingenious, funny-sad, empathic poems are woundingly precise in their exposure of a pattern of world-damage, of power misused 'in our name.' The recent history spotlighted in Galvin's poems is nauseating, but it's rendered with such pleasurably incisive phrasing and sonic swerve that I look up from the book awake, clarified, galvanized to face again the music and the news.--Catherine Wagner