Friedman (Mao & Matisse), director of the Poetry Project at St. Mark's Church in New York, injects equal measures of wonder and the quotidian into his latest collection. The prose poems in particular find the present by turns inevitable, minute, unthinkable, transitory, remote, obscured and highlighted: "The constant changing attraction of the world brings me to my knees in a Dutch cornfield. I've strode through dark whorls of peacock feathers and shooting stars, and I have never been clearer than I am at this moment about truth and permeable bodies.... We counterpoise stillness with expression on all sides." (July 15)
