I Tell You This Now - Daniel Lawless

In joy and terror all at once, the shining elegies and buoyant love poems of I Tell You This Now by Daniel Lawless unfold. Lawless has the uncanny ability to create piercing elegies that behave like tender breakup poems. His love poems are no less sublime. (After minutely describing a farmer's vintage tools, he dissolves them to lingerie... The result is a love poem that ends both very far yet very close indeed to those historical implements.) One of the deep pleasures of reading I Tell You This Now is that you never know quite where you're going until you get there. And getting there means getting it: the shock of gorgeous and gruesome recognition in each upturned world in Daniel Lawless's remarkable poems. -Molly Peacock