Regina Diperna's A Map of Veins begins with the photograph of a dead lover and a decomposing body. What "will he become?" the speaker asks, and in this moving sequence of elegies the lost lover is transmuted into a map--a landscape. In these intimate and ardent poems, absence is prismatic, refracted through our wide and everyday world. It lingers in a slack leather belt, the skin of a mango, and "a fortune // told in fallen leaves across / a swimming pool." Through dream, memory, and the careful laying of words, we are granted access to the secret and trembling lives of artifacts. Ultimately, the lover revives circuitously through the earth itself, through "an animal's expelled breath." And through the breath that has expelled these stunning poems.--Adam Giannelli, author of Tremulous Hinge Every moment of Ryan Teitman's Jesuits feels like elegy, like tribute--not only to a father but to a life that is impossible to hold "in place/ like a specimen slide.

" In shapely lines, Teitman twists and troubles syntax to bring these dreams into the waking world. There is a gauze, a film, present in these poems--"light is/ thin, and clothes us/ like linen," "a mosquito net/ of stars settles/ over town," and "the dark is pulled/ back like a sheet/ covering a body"--but the experience feels immediate, never diffused. Jesuits hit me in the gut. I'll go back to these poems again and again. --Maggie Smith, author of Good Bones "Sleep was a country / to retire to, an Ecuador" writes Ryan Teitman. Apt phrasing, as one could spend several evenings vacationing in the steam that rises from these well-wrought pages--part wistful noir, part mystic incense ("bluebottle, peat") emanating from a thurible. Jesuits is the work of a master craftsman, wherein family, fable, faith, and form cohabitate to create art as anodyne. Holy moly are these poems dreamy, healing.

--Marcus Wicker, author of Silencer and Maybe the Saddest Thing Compelling, appealing, cinematic . Rekdal refreshes the meaning and the image of being displaced in this world.--The Boston Globe, on her book, Imaginary Vessels.