Waywiser Press, 2014

From the coal country of Western Pennsylvania, to Camorra-ridden Naples, to the streets of Damascus before the outbreak of civil war, the lyric poems in this outstanding collection chart the complexities of national and intimate identity. By turns playful, lamenting, sceptical, bawdy, and aggrieved, they find the human fingerprint below history’s erasures, ultimately praising the endurance of the soul “so ample that, if that is all there is, / she makes a feast of thorns.”