LEAVE IT BEHIND expresses the paradoxical wish of every poet, seeking to leave behind-in both senses of that phrase-the language trace of her mind and heart. And what a fine first book Emily Raabe has left behind: vivid and strange, haunted by dreamed animals, alive with the landscapes and losses of her Vermont childhood. Raabe's poetry seeks "something like love/ in that it is the absence/ of distance"-and yet it faces both absence and distance with unflinching imagination, intelligence and grace. -Dan Chiasson, author of WHERE'S THE MOON, THERE'S THE MOON The poems in Emily Raabe's first...