The Sky Will Overtake You: Poems

The poems in The Sky Will Overtake You abound in a rare, infectious, and hard-won ecstasy, the consequence-at least in part-of exquisite attention to whatever they approach. They celebrate "the days laid out like jewels / on a merchant's table" even as they acknowledge grief and loss and the knowledge that "[There is] no keeping anything." These poems make ephemerality palpable, establishing it as an essential feature of what we treasure. "What Do You Have?" asks a poem's title. Its final lines respond, "Only this bit of time, / like clouds unforming- / even as you point to it, // gone."

-JACQUELINE OSHEROW, author of Divine Ratios