Taking its title from a poem by Paul Celan that is both elegiac and hopeful, but also playing off the notion of the "hart" walls erected to corral deer for a medieval hunt that was more a slaughter, and evoking the very physiology of the heart itself, this collection of poems explores the possibilities for love and feeling in a world besieged by tragedies in Bosnia, Kosovo, Rwanda, and elsewhere.

At times lyrical, at times satirical, at times aphoristic, Heartwall explores the complex relationship between the personal and the political, between our individual perceptions and the larger...