Museum of Islands: New and Selected Poems

Gary Margolis’s eighth book of poetry takes us inside the imagination of a museum of islands. With selections from Runner Without a Number and Time Inside, collections that speak to the Boston Marathon bombing and his experience of facilitating a poetry workshop in a maximum security prison, Margolis continues to explore how the facts of our lives - grief and joy, clarity and confusion - both sustain and lift us, and lead us to meanings in and beyond words. With humor and paradox, he takes us into the many emotional and natural landscapes of New England and our nation - from a town’s summer book sale to an activist scaling the Statue of Liberty; from Chagall to Facebook; from Emerson to Stephen Hawking; from Fenway Park to our state of the union, each poem is expressed with Margolis’s characteristic attention to detail and language, to the associative possibility with what we know, and to the mystery that allows us to walk through a life’s museum of islands.