Dance, You Monster, to My Soft Song

In David Starkey's latest collection of poems, the world has gone awry. A mudslide destroys part of one city, floods transform another, good people die. Ex-wives decapitate photos of their ex-husbands, saints sit in Starbucks with arrows poking from their torsos, and neighbors prey on one another while "Christmas lights...hang all year from unpainted eaves." And yet even amidst the turmoil and tragedy, moments of redemption emerge: "the surf soughs and the wind, / redolent of salt and eucalyptus, whispers of grace," as the world continues working its magic on us, "like a lazy scrawl of cirrus across the horizon- / dawn morphing into brighter day."