Michael Goldman, whose Small Sovereign won the 2022 Los Angeles Times Book Festival Award in Poetry, invites us to join him in small, overlooked and transformational experiences such as picking up a hurt elk, walking by a train-car diner, riding an escalator, touring fields of Verona, making soup for a sick friend, gluing a broken table, and choosing flooring. "All that separates you/from your surroundings/is your imagination/of yourself being who you are."Goldman is especially qualified as he draws on experience as a remodeling carpenter, a jazz musician, a Danish translator, a gardener and a parent, to draw us into greater awareness of life's minute pains and victories from numerous points of view. "We are all sharing atoms, at least/?/like the sea mixes with the sky/words do not keep them apart." The poems explore the paradox of personal power and powerlessness, using everyday experience as a door to the universal. "The organization has its priorities/which do not include delight.".