In this follow-up to her National Book Critics Circle Award–winning Columbarium
, critic and poet Stewart offers sequences and serial poems that move across historical time, and continually reveal the ominous hiding in the innocuous, or vice versa (“burning bread smells like/ baked earth”). Beginning with children encountering the world through play, this gathering of poems, with their masterful cadences, allegorically pitched narratives and various speakers “bound/ deep to old griefs and wonder,” build toward an indictment of aggression and war. Contemporary violence meets canonical literature, illuminating the repetition of history and calling for a reexamined culpability: “War profiteering has many means, including/ the sale of poems against war.” Whether it’s the command of a window seat leading to a mediation on ecological disaster, or the discovery of an arrowhead (“sharp enough/ to penetrate/ fur or hide/ or hated flesh,/ and pin it/ back to earth”) to a question about imperialism, these poems ask the reader to register anew, from “small changes of perspective,” the darker implications what we take for granted, even when “[t]hings beg to be used,/ to be turned, and/ the reasons to withdraw/ are hard to know.” (Sept.)
