Merciful Days by Jesse Graves Ian Hall In his most recent collection, Merciful Days, Jesse Graves labors to make some sense of memory, its caprices and concrete reveries. In poems that flit impressionistically between youth, young manhood, and middle age, Graves’s verse puts language to a landscape and populace absolutely ghosted by a past both immediate and antique. Part and parcel to the populace’s affinity for times bygone is an almost uniform connection to the terrestrial

Blues From the age of seven, everything I felt in connection with a rectangle of framed sunlight was dominated by a single passion. If my first glance of the morning was for the sun, my first thought was for the butterflies it would engender. —Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory 1. The woods around my house are dense and varied. Red oak, hemlock, sugar maple, white birch. In the summer the vegetation grows into a thick wall, shading us from the sun, cocooning us from the rest of

Swallowed Light by Michael Wasson Landis Grenville This is a book of loss. The gun and the ghost dance in Wasson’s poetry, both reminders of a hollow, of a gap, of an erasure that cannot be stitched. There are spaces that cannot be filled in these poems, spaces that the speakers of his poems are always calling into, calling themselves back to, always aware that they carry these points of silence with them. If his speakers look in the rearview mirror they will see “a decade st