The poems in What Ridiculous Things We Could Ask of Each Other comb through the rubble of everyday life in search of the shards of beauty and hope that might still be found there. At the same time, these poems struggle to conceive of the beautiful and the hopeful in some way that can escape the purely naive. They confront loss and wrong, but because “Elegy / is stupid, if you can avoid it,” they seek, so much as is possible, not to offer consolation in exchange for what ought not to have happened in the first place. If making the world right with itself would be simultaneously the simplest and the most difficult thing, these poems try to imagine the moment right before that change would become possible and try to imagine the questions we’d be confronted with then, in hope of opening the possibility of imagining the answers.

Selected by: Kevin Young