Graveyards on Other Planets

In his sophomore collection, Roberto Pastore hones in on an era of constant flux, violence and grief, offering a kind of bewildered solace with a misfit voice that feels truly renewed. ' I attend the reunion/of myself. Swapping out lime water for chamomile tea./ Comb-over days in which we refuse to accept what is lost.' In poems that are self-reflexive and elegiac, yet full of flashes of the unexpected, we are invited to look tenderly and unflinchingly at our own mysterious experience of living, our own ' sad heartsong' . Here are poems that feel both intimate and timely, yet somehow beamed in from another planet, far, far away.