A pencil in my hand, its secret life / is charcoal, the wood already burnt, / a sacrifice.

A poem is a box, a thing, to put other things in. For safe keeping.

A pencil in my hand, its secret life / is charcoal, the wood already burnt, / a sacrifice.

To walk into Bill Olsen's poems is to enter a mind so weirdly curious, you can't be released to sadness, not yet: it's just too surprising. But this book-half microscope, half telescope-shadows grief, our shared and ordinary life where an old neighbor obsessively gathers twigs to wish back the tree, where the moon is regularly ‘sawn in half,’ where sprinklers give off ‘little wet speeches.’ What else? It's brilliantly instead and odd.