Hoof by Kerrin P. Sharpe arrives with new urgency and longing. These are poems about a father who can only remember one word, ponies that grow hooves of basalt as they pull Scott and Shackelton around Ōtamahua in sledges, and a woman named Johanna living in a small village in Greenland. She writes about the strange places that watch over our parents, and the delicate but brutal mechanics of surgery. Famous people appear here too: Leonard Cohen, Ted Hughes, William Blake, and Benedict Cumberbatch at a bus stop.

Hoof is an invitation to travel by train through the poet’s world. The trains that begin each of the three sections in the book give the reader time to stop and stare.