Floyd Skloot’s Far West intertwines the past and present, as time alternates between racing and standing still. Crafting poems that confront memory lapses and painful recollections, Skloot traces his moments of purest perception and his wife practicing music, his daughter finding delight in the presence of wildlife, Vladimir Nabokov able to lose himself when playing goalie in a soccer match. A poem about a forgotten word or name can lead to one about a song that refuses to stop playing over and over in our minds, or to an evocation of a long-dead futuristic novelist who comes back from the afterlife to find a world even stranger than any he imagined. In poems that range from traditional forms and short lyrics to longer narratives and free verse, Skloot explores how emotional experiences―memory and forgetting, love and loss, reverie and urgent attention―all come together in our search for coherence and authentic self-expression.

Looking Up collects more than a decade of new poems by Dave Smith. These include reflections upon events, animals, and people who prove to have a salutary significance to this poet, now approaching his eightieth year. He ponders the substantial changes wrought by retirement, which brings no expectations, no obligations, no role beyond what one has left, which prompts the question, What will you do now? Both the question and its answers are the subject of Looking Up, as Smith gives us poems as acts of attention, raptures, comedies, sardonic narratives, vignettes of grief and joy whose testimony shows that love is surely our core reality