Ranging across a diverse contemporary society of night-school courses and displaced adult learners, from concrete apartment blocks full of exiles and poor economic migrants to the Iraq War, Germany of the 1930s, Vilna of the 1920s, and medieval Girona, What Next, Old Knife? is a sobering encounter with class, culture, and history - personal and otherwise. Throughout this new collection of poems, David Axelrod struggles with how we learn and unlearn our humanity, imagining the ways in which individuals and whole societies live with and recover from moral catastrophe.

The collection ends with a long choral poem, a visionary dialogue between the living and the dead who insist that language can resist nihilism, reclaim hope, and enact future accord.