Dispatches

In Richard Jackson's timely and timeless book Dispatches he writes that "the eye of the storm always closes before we know what we see"-and yet these quiet meditations feel and see so much to such an intensity and degree that they seem to explode the difference between joy and sorrow into a kind of seamless grace and aching peace. Transcendent.-Robert Vivian



Love and violence. Beauty and desolation. Jackson's immense lyric gifts are on full display here, as comfortable with images of sunlight on water as with a man eating from a dumpster. Troubled and troubling, these beautiful poems speak bravely into the winds of history. They ask unanswerable questions, struggle to say something that refuses to be said, but in that failure discover a deeply human and habitable space, something worth living for. -Mark Cox