“If there is nothing to live for, there is nothing to die for,” the poet proclaims in “Love Poem for Terrorists,” in a piece that questions the existence of love in the lives of the people who committed acts of terror during the Paris attacks of 2015. In “Grand Ballroom Reception,” a pantoum, a young boy in the 1950s Denmark challenges his atheist parents and takes himself to church alone. “How to Forget the City Morgue” places the reader in NYC in 2001, a few months after 9/11. In “let Us Go to Argentina” we join an elderly woman on her death bed who believes she has returned to her childhood in Buenos Aires.

The poems in this book cross oceans and points of view of people wrestling with life and death. Throughout, the theme of the heart returns as a symbol of love (“The Heart as a Pump”) as well as biology (both “Grand Ballroom Reception” and “Brooklyn Super” deal with heart attacks). The sestina “Exit to Tenth Street” is both a portrait of the poet’s father and a riveting true tale of getting lost in the desert. Does everyone make it out? Read this book.