With rare integrity of shape and vision, Richard L. Rose offers a journey through the grief and mental static of the current time to a sense of an historical opportunity for "widening the circle of compassion," as Einstein once said. With strong verse whose line breaks, electric diction, and magnetic imagery push the reader from line to line and poem to poem, PushBack takes you from humorous situations like "A Tramp Packs Up Along Pennsylvania Avenue," to speculative fiction like "Bittner Gets a Lift," to the poignant social criticism on immigration policy in "We're full." In the culminating title poem, "PushBack," a continuously inventive narrative, the sustained energy of resistance, criticism, and compassion intensifies, going from scenes of battle, where: None of the stunned in the dumb stumble of the not yet dead staggering in fields of battle from Bohemia to Yemen, flies on lips and eyes, believes that, equitably given, such wealth of horror is a prize. to a new place, where, Soon dark as an unintentional choice, the pond resolved to space, as I recall it now, a spacious interval of placid surface misted with stars. A loon sang out. Things need not be this way—such chopping choices, fear, and fret; a mind that's hard and set. Things need not be this way. PushBack is a rich journey well worth taking.