Physical and emotional pain, internal scarring, and explorations of social illness color the poems of this collection with hauntingly honest accounts, simultaneously filling readers with both a sense of hope and of surrender.

By turns elegiac, ecopoetic, and impolitic, Cynthia Hogue s eighth collection, Revenance, is a condensery of empathic encounters with others and otherness. Hogue coins a wordfrom revenant, French for ghost to consider questions of life and afterlife, and to characterize the ways in which the people and places we love return to us, and return us to ourselves, holding us to account. The poems of Revenance contain telling touchstone figures, like a guide named Blake who, noting signs of global warming, will speak of spirits but not angels; a man who dies and is brought back...