Poetry. David Rigsbee’s new poems turn to recent history refracted through an art as schooled by trauma, as the beauties his poems also celebrate, from the edge of tragedy to moments too human in their epiphanies to be swallowed by oblivion.

David Rigsbee’s poems move with philosophical intensities. The perspectives the poems offer are complex, highly nuanced, rooted in critical engagements with a cultural tradition, and often less comfortable than the refusal of perspective practiced by more vertiginous writers.–Robert McNamara