The poems in Carl Dennis's thirteenth collection are informed by an engagement with a world not fully accessible, a world that can only be known with help from the imagination. Only if we imagine alternatives to our present selves, Dennis suggests, can we begin to grasp who we are. Only if we imagine what is hidden from us about the lives of others can those lives begin to seem whole. Only if we can conceive of a world different from the one we seem to inhabit can we begin to make sense of the country we call our own.
